Mastering the Fast Start with Bill Stinnett
As a sales leader, it's crucial to equip your new sales reps with the tools they need to succeed. However, when there’s money on the table, you want to see a return-on-hiring investment as soon as possible. For this to occur, you need to position your sales reps to become successful – and fast!
So, how can tech company founders and sales leaders optimize their process to guarantee a lucrative fast-start?
Bill Stinnett, Founder and President of Sales Excellence, has all the answers.
In this jaw-dropping episode of Evolved Sales Live, our host Jonathan Fischer sits down with Bill to discuss exactly how to get your newest sales reps ramped up to max performance – in the shortest amount of time.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Meet Bill Stinnett:
When Bill set out to build his own company, he envisioned helping sales organizations accomplish their goals and objectives through process improvement, world-class sales training, and cutting-edge technology. In a little over a decade, he's done just that. Sales Excellence has become a world leader in sales methodology and training, helping hundreds of companies across six continents achieve breakthrough sales. How? By solving specific sales-related-problems through highly-customized training and technology solutions.
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Check out the transcription of this episode below!
Jonathan Fischer 0:06
All right, and here we are. Welcome back to the Evolve sales leader. I'm your host, Jonathan Fisher. And today's live edition of the podcast we'll be talking about mastering the fast start. How long from day one? Should it take a new sales rep to ramp up and knock it out of the park? weeks months? Why does it matter? And what can sales professionals do to optimize it? Well, today we have with us a bonafide sales expert, Mr. Bill Stinnett, the founder and president of Sales excellence Incorporated. for over 20 years Bill and his team at sales excellence have helped some of the world's most highly regarded companies get even better by sharpening every aspect of their sales from hiring and training to process and skills development. Bill is also a multiple Best Selling Author of such titles as think like your customer selling results, and the not yet published the digital selling handbook do out before the end of the year. And by the way, Bill is giving away a free chapter of the book to all of today's live attendees. So stay tuned for details here a little bit later on. Bill, Senate. Fantastic to have you on the evolved sales leader with us today.
Bill Stinnett 1:16
So glad to be here, Jonathan. Thanks a lot for inviting me. I can't wait to get this conversation started.
Jonathan Fischer 1:21
All right. Well, let's jump right in. We're talking about mastering the fast start the ramp up, you know, a brand new SDR or sales pro from day one to one should they be really great at their job, right? Why does that matter? Is my first question to you why what what are the factors involved with the ramp up?
Bill Stinnett 1:41
Well, when you say why does it matter? This might be completely obvious to everyone. But let's just take it as a question that I think has merit. One of the reasons it matters, of course, is we make a tremendous investment when we hire somebody. And we'd like to see a return on that investment. And we'd like to see that return sooner than later. But one of the other reasons, I think it's so crucial that we minimize that or truncate that ramp to volume or that ramp to plan is that we need them to be successful. Because in today's market with how challenging it is to hire good people, people need to feel confident that they can come to work there that they can, in fact succeed and get up to the level that is going to be expected format. And if they're seeing other people doing it they experienced themselves are more likely to stick around to
Jonathan Fischer 2:28
Yeah, these are huge factors in the success of every individual Pro, but the overall success of your team as well. So how are tech company founders and sales leaders across the board getting this piece wrong, as you see it?
Bill Stinnett 2:42
Well, one of the things that's happening, I use this little phrase frequently, I think that we need to be working just as hard to keep our good people as our competitors are working to steal them. So there are a variety of factors, I think that make a sales job or a position somewhat undesirable. Let's let's talk about a couple of those. One would be probably Big Brother looking over your shoulder constantly. And micromanagement. No sales guys like that. Another one would be probably no really good onboarding plan. So I'll get into this in just a few minutes. But we leave salespeople really floundering to kind of put their own plan together and organize their resources and so forth to be successful. I would also say that we hire people, and we don't really put enough energy into making sure that they're successful, as I said, in a shorter time as possible, which has to do with the resources that we provide to them. And I'm going to share with the group today as we talk this through some of the things that we need to make available to a new salesperson or for any salesperson on the team to give them the best chance to get up to speed as they possibly can.
Jonathan Fischer 3:48
I love that. So before we get into the details of how to fix it, why do you think that sales leaders of professionals are making these mistakes?
Bill Stinnett 3:58
Well, probably just habit, more than many other thing. I would say that over the years, I've observed that common mo for many companies, is let's bring on five sales guys, see which of them can hit their number, keep the one that does hit his number and for hire, fire the other four and hire five more. And so we kind of washed through thinking putting all the onus on the sales professional themselves, to figure out how to make themselves successful or a lot of the onus on them. And so he's kind of see who survives it and who doesn't. And I think one of the things that companies are going to be forced to do is to think a little bit more diligently about how can we ensure their success going forward just because it's becoming so difficult to attract and retain the right kind of talent right now.
Jonathan Fischer 4:45
And it is a very interesting environment in terms of talent. They're really good people have headhunters after them all the time. So I think you're really on point with this issue of taking care of the team that you have. So another question I have for you just More broadly speaking, you know, you read around in different surveys that have been done, the research is out there, and how long should the ramp up take? The answer? The answers are all over the map. I've seen, you know, three weeks, three months, I've seen 910 months on average. There are a lot of factors involved there. What are your thoughts on that? How long should it take? And what are the factors involved that helped to determine that?
Bill Stinnett 5:23
Yeah, so probably one of the number one factors, as you call it, that goes into determining how soon somebody can be successful is the average length of your sales cycle. And that varies based on a few different things, the size of the complexity of what you offer to your clients, the nature of that product, and or service, some things can be sold very quickly. Other things take months of due diligence, for example, for customers to make their buying decision. larger investments tend to take longer than than smaller investments. And so there are a number of different factors that determine that, but the length of the sales cycle is crucial. As you might imagine, if the average length of sales cycle is nine months long, then you're probably not going to have somebody that starts and in six months their plan, they didn't have time to find business and bring it to closure in that timeframe. And Coach reducing or minimizing that length of average sales cycle is one of the objectives that would be done here. But it does vary greatly. My thought is that the more we can help to create that ramp and that onboarding process, we can shorten that time and get to volume and get to that return on investment all but more quickly.
Jonathan Fischer 6:33
Yeah, there's a lot, a lot of a lot of your insights that I want to squeeze you for today. So without further ado, why don't we jump into that, you know, what, what are some of the key factors that you've seen have worked with your clients, and you've worked with, you know, fortune 500 clients and very varied sectors, in terms of what industry they're working in? So what are your insights on this? And maybe you can share some case studies along the way, Bill?
Bill Stinnett 6:58
Yeah, good question. So I actually printed something out. Before we joined the show today, it's just a little checklist that I've been using for a lot of years. I call this the sales excellence readiness checklist. Now, sales excellence, just be the name of our company. So I called that. But the idea of a readiness checklist is, what are the things that you need to provide to a new salesperson or as I said, even somebody that's that's been on the team a while? What do they need to have foundationally in terms of resources, and as I like to think of as sales assets, so that they can go out and be as successful as soon as they can possibly be? Now, one of the things of course, that immediately comes to mind is the technology that we provide to a salesperson or they call a tech stack, right? Are we giving them a CRM system? Are we giving them a means to go out and find people's names and email addresses and phone numbers? Are they having to do that research on their own? Are we giving them different kinds of communication tools, ways to automate, let's say, their email outreach, etc. So technology is a factor. But I think one of the areas that companies are missing it the most, is they're not providing the the raw material or the assets, as I said, I could call them that salespeople can start to put to use immediately, they want to give a couple of examples, please. Okay, so right from this little checklist here, and I'm gonna make this available, anybody that wants a copy of this before the end of our session here, number one, it says this, a list of the top five or six business problems that you can solve are results that you can deliver for each industry or customer type that you sell to. Now, we think we do that. Because when we bring on a new salesperson, and we put them through some kind of an onboarding, training, a lot of times that's very technology specific. And while we might talk about the features and functions of the technology, what we don't always do is take that one step further kind of a last mile. And explain, here are the problems that this particular product solves. Here are the outcomes that this will help our clients to achieve right down to literally, we're going to change this measure by this much over this period of time, and back this up with some kind of evidence based on what we've done for existing clients, or we've done surveys or what have you, with our customers, arming people with that kind of knowledge that they can then go out and tell the story to their prospective clients. If we don't give them the raw material and the assets to do that, then we're kind of leaving them on their own. And that's why maybe three or four out of five don't make it
Jonathan Fischer 9:33
it makes so much sense. And I've seen an awful lot where it there's a there's a we've talked about a lot on this show as well, where there's a lot of focus on here's our solution here all the fancy bells and whistles. You know, here's how our how our software as a service can do this, this, this or this, but we're not really connecting to the dot that is solving a problem and many years ago, Jay Abraham told us all that you're going to get time a nine times more likelihood of a bye bye Based on solving a problem, as opposed to, here's the benefit you can gain. So there's a real real need there for that. I love that. How do you do that? Like, what are some examples where you've helped your clients put together assets to tell the story?
Bill Stinnett 10:14
Yeah, this was good. So I'm surprised it's only nine times more likely, to me, it would be more like 100 times more than just talking about features and functions. I think that's probably more so today than ever, because there's so many different channels, and people are being marketed to from so many different directions that we've become literally numb to product features and functions. It's not something even registers in people's minds anymore, I think. And so I think the number one way to sell problems you can solve and results you can deliver is to do a better job of documenting what you've already done for existing clients. And let me give you a case in point. So just earlier this afternoon, I was working with one of my clients, small sales team, but they sell nationally and they sell big ticket stuff, to all different kinds of companies and municipalities. One of the things that we were talking about was prospecting and reaching out to find new clients. And so one gentleman had identified a specific kind of a organization within a city government that he thought would be ideal for what they provide. And so he had a huge list of all the cities throughout his section of California that he was going to approach. And I simply asked the question, well, what are you going to say to him when you call? He said, What do you mean, I saw what what are you going to talk about? He's like, Well, I'm going to talk about our products and services. Of course, I said, but can you give them any examples about how you've helped someone else like them to solve a specific problem or achieve a specific outcome? Or result? Do you have any case studies, any use cases, any kind of a business case or a Steven, just a story that you can tell about this? His response was, Well, I think I've got one customer, yeah, in that space that has bought from us for a few years, but I haven't talked to him in a while. And so as we queried into this a little bit, it became obvious that when he calls these new prospective clients, all he's gonna be able to talk about us himself. Because he doesn't know how even that one existing client is using his product to actually improve their business performance. So how can he possibly give examples or share what he might be able to do for the new client? If he doesn't even know what he's been doing for the existing clients that have all one of them?
Jonathan Fischer 12:24
Yeah, so that's really good. Do you recommend that companies have somebody that's tasked with that specifically, for example, maybe that's something for the marketing director to be on top of? Or how can, how can that be implemented?
Bill Stinnett 12:39
So I don't see anything wrong with making a marketing person responsible for this, but I would actually make the individual account owners foster that relationship and start that conversation and have that discussion. And there are a couple of reasons for doing that. Number one, when you go back to an existing client to see how they're doing, it almost always reveals another sales opportunity. And so to send a marketing person in there to have that discussion, to me, probably we're gonna miss that additional sales opportunity. But the other one is that we probably want the sales person themselves to hear it from the horse's mouth, exactly where they started. I like to call it point day, it's the problem they started with point C, the goal or objective they tried to achieve and what they did along the way, at point B, what did they buy or implement and use from us that took them from where they are at point A all the way to point C, their desired result? When that conversation becomes something that the salesperson has with the customer, and they get to ask questions, and so forth. This does, it's tremendous confidence builder. And then the likelihood of them being able to go out and talk to the next client and relate this thing. I met with another CIO yesterday, who said this, this and this, what do you think about that, Mr. Johnson? So it's not just documenting these things, maybe and putting them in a in a written form on some sort of a database someplace. I want salespeople to hear it with their ears and get in their heart, that they can walk into that next conversation with some confidence knowing we help these other guys, I think we can help you too.
Jonathan Fischer 14:08
Yeah, I love that. I mean, there's no doubt that there's going to be a tremendous energy from coming out of a conversation like that, and one sales, almost invariably lead to the next. I do love that. So the creating the gathering, the data is a big part of it. Is there a Are there ways to deliver it that are more effective than others, like, you know, is this something that should just be shared in the sales meetings? Is it worth actually spending some decent money in and actually creating some polished assets that tell the story a combination? What are some other best practices for deploying on this?
Bill Stinnett 14:41
Yeah, really good question. So there is nothing wrong, of course, with as you said, spending some money and turning something like that into a really nice glossy brochure, or maybe a beautifully produced video or something featuring a client telling about the relationship we have with them promoting that and put it on a web sight maybe up on a YouTube channel, et cetera. But in today's marketplace, people tend to actually gravitate toward and somehow relate more to things that are a little less polished than that. And so a simple telephone video with you and your client saying, Hey, I'm here today with Bob Smith and Bob and I were just working walking through his factory and Bob, why don't you tell him what we've been doing together over the last four months. And now we're talking into this video here. And I just post that thing up on LinkedIn. People love that kind of impromptu informal thing these days, probably more than they liked the highly polished. And so I would encourage you and all salespeople to just start telling the stories and share this in emails that we send and short messages we send on LinkedIn. And in impromptu videos like that, that we share, figure out a way to make this become more of a conversation as opposed to like an advertisement, if you will.
Jonathan Fischer 15:57
Yeah, I'm hearing I'm hearing us is these companies need to empower their reps to leverage their personal brand and help tell the story. I think there's a lot of power behind that. So let's bring it back to sort of this. Let's bring it back to the new hire, you know, he or she is really part of the team. And they're not yet part of those conversations. But this is helping create an environment. What are some ways to connect those dots really effectively in training? or managing or like, what are some some of the best practices around that side of
Bill Stinnett 16:27
it? Good question. So I'll just give you a couple examples. From my own experience, I was hired by a great sales manager in about 97, I believe it was. And one of the things that was great about him is that when I went to work there, I spent the first two weeks just riding along with him out seeing clients for the territory that I was now responsible for. So he came with me, we wrote around, he introduced me to people that he knew is actually his territory. Prior to be moving up the vice president I took over his territory. So as part of kind of the handoff process, we went around, and we visited a couple of dozen clients over those couple of weeks, that was a beautiful way to get me a chance to see the customers to have a conversation with them, to learn how they were using our technology, et cetera. I use that so effectively, they're in that setting. And then a couple years later, when I went to a different company, and wasn't afforded that same opportunity, I took the initiative to go to my manager and ask Could I ride along with some of the other salespeople just to go see their clients and learn and listen and walk through the plant and just get a feel for how they were using our stuff, nothing beats getting a chance to hear the customer talk about what they're deriving in terms of benefit, as opposed to as I said, reading, they're on a brochure or some sort of a video.
Jonathan Fischer 17:47
I love that. And that that speaks to the side where the professional him or herself takes the initiative takes full ownership that they are a corporation of one within their company, even though they're their employees.
Bill Stinnett 18:00
Yeah, I'm a big believer in that intrapreneurship, or business within a business kind of concept or model. I think that to stand out in today's marketplace, if we behave just like we're one of the sales reps, than our customers will only ever see us as one of the sales reps. And so it just really is a different level of interest that you take when you decide this patch of ground or this vertical market or these 25 named accounts. This is this is my business, and go out to seek to understand the customer and the market and that so you know how to position what you offer to solve specific problems. As I heard one marketing expert say a couple of months ago, I love this. He said every question that you have, about what to sell and how to sell it and how you should package it and how you should develop it next time the answer to every one of those questions, your customer already knows the answer. It's just a matter of going and having the conversation and finding out what the answer is. Let's go anytime you take it the other way around, right? I've got this product for sale who wants to buy it? Sometimes we need to go out and find out what the customer needs and wants and then bring the solution to fit that.
Jonathan Fischer 19:08
Yeah. And track it carefully. So you have her for the next conversation. Exactly right. So great conversation around the whole asset building side of it. What about this, this other side of it where there are efforts that need to be made you spoke about that there's not enough effort being focused on retaining the headhunters are out there. They're getting the messages on LinkedIn, they're getting the unsolicited emails, the really good people, you know, the, the one that you know, she she was your award winner, the last three quarters, you know, they're going after her. So what do you need to do as a manager and a sales leader to better retain your best people?
Bill Stinnett 19:51
Well, there are a few things that I hear directly from the mouths of the salespeople that I work with. I work with 1000s of them. What I hear corpse is crazy amounts of overhead, meaning I've got everything to do, except go see customers, I've got spreadsheets to fill out on meetings to attend, and databases to update, et cetera, et cetera. My thinking is you're going to pay somebody 100 or $200,000, a year to sell, why in the world would you only give them eight or 10 hours a week to do the selling, and bury them with a bunch of overhead all the rest of the time. Now, I know, the pushback is, gee, we can't afford support personnel, right? We need our sales guys to do this or that. But if you're really hiring good people, or as you said, the very best people on the team, the specialists, you wouldn't ask a medical specialist, for example, to handle all kinds of, you know, taking blood pressure and, and taking people's temperature and stuff, you get somebody else to support that position to sense that a nurse, somebody can support those things. But take that highly skilled expert that you have, and put them on what they are best at doing. So overhead is one of them that I think is absolutely huge. Another one, it seems to me is just opportunities to grow. And to become better at their craft. The people who are already the best at what they do are the first ones to want to learn more and get even better. And so frequently, as a sales trainer, I'm called, and I'll hear from a sales manager off, I've got a team of about 25 Guys, but you know, at least 10 of them are just not at all doing what I needed. And I really need help with these 10. That'd be fine. I'd love to help with the 10. But there's a chance that you're going to get your biggest return on your investment from the top five, if you'll invest in them and give them more opportunities. So that would be one of them is just give them a an obvious career growth path to pursue and to and just to expand their income circle or expand their their responsibility circle. I think that it's not that much different than it ever was people want a chance to contribute more and to accomplish more in their jobs. It's not always just about who has the highest base salary, at least in my opinion. I don't see that.
Jonathan Fischer 21:59
No, I think it's very true. Everyone wants to make a good income, of course, but there is a whole lot more to feeling like you are that you're able to fulfill some of your more powerful abilities and exercise your talents, do What gives you joy and positive feedback when you do it in the workplace. Obviously, there's always gonna be some amount of grunt work, but I love what you said there about minimizing that what you called overhead, and let Hey, let the sales pro go out and do what he does best. You know, make those those connections, follow up those conversations and help business leaders get out of their own way and make a great decision and buy the service or product that they should to get to those benefits. It's it's another good reason why so many very successful companies. They even divvy up the whole sales development piece itself, right? Get your SDR is out there grinding through trying to get those initial touches to happen, get get some calendars filled and have the more seasoned and more highly trained individuals come behind that work on developing that into true pipeline and closing of deals. It makes a lot of sense to specialize. How does this speak then to the ramp up if we're if we're if we're going to commit ourselves as sales leaders to provide better assets? That that's pretty good as long as we're connecting those dots. But how would you say the culture of trying to feed the Eagles and starve the turkeys? Like one of my mentors used to call it? How does that translate into creating a more effective and hopefully shorter ramp up for new hires on the team?
Bill Stinnett 23:28
Yeah, so your new hires are naturally not your top performers out of the gate, right? Because they're brand new. So all the more reason that I think we need to assess what makes are good people as good as they are. And almost without exception, what you're going to find is knowledge of the industry knowledge of the customers themselves, the problems we're faced with, how do we position what we bring to market to solve those problems? And that's why so many of these things on this little preparedness checklist are so important. Let me give you another example here, can I it says a list of the top six to 12 diagnostic questions that you can use in either written or verbal communication to reveal or create new sales opportunities. Think about that. Six to 12 diagnostic questions, I sometimes call these elevator questions. Remember the old phrase we used to hear an elevator pitch, right? Jump onto an elevator, what would you say at the customer in the 30 seconds it took to get to the 14th floor or whatever. I think that so many of our customers are so sick of that approach. What we really want to do is to create a dialogue and a conversation with clients. And so we need to be arming new people with what are the best practices in terms of the diagnostic questions that our very best salespeople are asking. So on this call we did earlier this afternoon. That's another topic that we discussed there. And what that team decided to do as they're going to collect four or five or six good diagnostic questions, conversation starters, ways to get customers talking, and then just share that with the entire sales team so that we all have an additional one An arrow in our quiver are an additional tool in our tool belt to use so that we can start more conversations. It's really a matter of kind of collecting some of that. And then making sure that's available, there is no reason that a person should start at a company and work there six months, before they learn how to create sales opportunities, or how to generate something, we should be teaching them on day one. These are the questions you ask in this situation, when you go call on a bank, here are the four things you want to know when you call on a retailer, here are the three things you're going to want to ask them about. We should make that just readily available day one, here are your assets.
Jonathan Fischer 25:35
I love that. Keep going. Your list is solid gold brother.
Bill Stinnett 25:39
Yeah. Okay, so let's see what else is on here probing questions designed to determine what if any competitive advantage you have and to differentiate yourself against competitors. So the kinds of things that we can use to determine whether or not we're the best fit, how we might be somehow more uniquely qualified. Oh, here, I love this one, a list of the six or eight most common non price objections that they might expect to hear, either on initial outreach or when closing an opportunity notice I said non price objections, because of course, you're always gonna get the objection around this is the price is too high. But what are the other six or eight things that customers tend to get hung up on? And how can we arm a new salesperson or any salesperson with one or two good responses to those top six or eight questions? I think of this as literally teaching them kind of like self defense. Remember that old movie Karate Kid? Remember that? Yeah. And the kid went to Mr. Miyagi, to learn karate. And he said, first, you got to do wax on wax off, and that whole thing, everybody remembers that, right? We need to teach people the moves and the counter moves and what to say when somebody addresses them, or objects or offers this rebuttal, and so forth. Never let them be surprised. And there's no again, no good reason why we should let everybody on a team learn that in themselves, why not arm them with those things when they come in? They want so they can get ramped up even faster.
Jonathan Fischer 27:01
Yeah, I love that. That's really good stuff. Well, we wouldn't make that list available to people. And if we'll work out something with you there bill, we can either maybe we can post it, or make it available to the folks that were on on today's event with us live. So really good stuff on getting that ramp up. To be optimized, some some good gems here, I want to transition just a little bit, we promised to give away a free chapter of your new book. Now, this is obviously an OnPoint topic, the digital selling handbook. I'm excited to get the whole thing, frankly. But let's let's maybe prime the pump a little bit on that topic, the digital digital selling, how are you defining that we all have our own definition. But how do you tackle that?
Bill Stinnett 27:43
Yeah, good question. So what I decided to do with this is to to recognize I'm going to just share this statistic that I kind of introduced in the first chapter that is mind blowing. And that sets the stage for the whole discussion. So Gartner came out with some research recently, that said that the average customer who is involved in a complex buying process so this is buying something that's not just a widget, something that's significant amount of money that has multiple people may be involved in decision process, that that buying unit is spending as much as I think the number was 84% of their time, behind closed doors. In other words, only about 16% 16 17% of their time, are they actually spending talking to providers and suppliers, and would be vendors and so forth about the investment that they're going to make. So that means that if they're looking at maybe three different suppliers vetting out three different ones, any one of us might only get five or 6% of that customer's attention throughout their entire buying process. That's incredible. But we know it's true. People tend to want to stock companies, right, you want to go and look at their website, you want to check them out on LinkedIn, you want to go look at some at some star ratings on their website, or on Yelp or on amazon.com. We do a lot of this kind of research, like 27% of the time that company spends is an online research 27% of time and only 5% Talking to the provider of the vendor. It's mind blowing. But here's what that says to me. If we're not using digital assets, like things in writing, audio and video, if we're not using digital assets to continue to do some of the selling for us and continue to persuade and influence that buying process while we're not there. Then we lose the ability to influence that process up maybe 94% of the time. I mean, that's mind boggling to think how little access that we have. So the entire book is about how do you use digital assets not only to attract business, but to continue to work opportunities through the customer's buying process, whether they give us a chance to talk to them or not. We should be the ones that are putting up the YouTube videos that they're watching. We should be the ones that are providing the white papers that they're referencing that are giving them the reasons to buy or not to buy, and creating these kinds of assets that we can use for digital selling. That's what this book is about.
Jonathan Fischer 30:10
That's fantastic. Now the chapter in question, I'm going to, we're going to provide the link here in mere seconds. What's the topic of the chapter giving away today?
Bill Stinnett 30:21
Yep, so the first chapter is called selling the way customers buy today. And the entire premise is just simply understanding buyer behavior in a modern world. You know, we came through the whole lockdown experience over the last couple of years, with some major changes in the way that customers are willing to engage with salespeople. I wish it wasn't true. I'd like to just deny it, I'd like to say nothing's changed, just ring the phone. Unfortunately, we ride around the phone a lot these days to get anybody to pick it up. And even if they do pick it up, they're startled that you've called the old fashioned cold calling and just sending out a zillion emails, the the response rates on that has dropped off so substantially, that I find that a lot of times it ends up being somewhat of a waste of time. And so this first chapter, really understanding the way that customers buy today helps us to get in the mindset of well, what should I be doing that? What should I be talking to him about? What can I provide to a customer? before they ever meet me, so that they can come to know like, and trust me, before they ever talk to me? Love? And we know this old adage, right? People buy from people they know like and trust. Yeah, well, what if they won't even talk to us? How do we get them to know like, and trust us? Yeah, that's where digital selling assets come in. And that's what the books about
Jonathan Fischer 31:40
this huge report report to find. As you stated it is, according to Chet Holmes, one of my mentors worked with him for years 60% of every sale. So that's, well, I love it, Bill, we've just provided the link. And if someone happens to be listening and not watching, I want to give you that link, just verbally, that is sales excellence.com, forward slash handbook, I'll say the second time that sales excellence.com, forward slash handbook, when you get there, you can put in your information, get the free chapter downloaded. And we're still months away from the book even being published. So that's pretty cool. You're here, as far as I'm aware, Bill, right the first time you've given away a chapter of your book before it was even published.
Bill Stinnett 32:24
Yeah, that's the first time. And so that little on that little URL sales excellence.com/handbook. You go there, and you can just enter your name and email. So I know where to send this to you. And I'll send you the first chapter. But there's also buttons and links there if you want to, to preorder the book. So anybody that just wants to get in line and get a pre order on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, there'll be links in there for that, too. So I hope that you'll take me up on that. But I also want to make the point that this little checklist here that I've been reading from and talking about, a lot of people really liked this. So if you go out there to the slash handbook, page, and you complete that you get your email, just hit reply to that email. And that'll come personally to me, Bill at sales excellence.com. And then I'll just attach this and send it right back to you. So we'll get to know each other across the email as well. So I'm thrilled to share this first chapter with you and the introduction. I think you'll really like it a lot. And hopefully, it'll make you be interested in buying the book as well. And I'd be really thrilled to put this little checklist in your hands because this has helped a lot of my clients really better arm their salespeople to get ramped up much more quickly.
Jonathan Fischer 33:29
Well, Bill, it's been a thrill to have you with us for today's podcast episode. You're fantastic guest I would love to have you back again sometime soon.
Bill Stinnett 33:37
Well, I'd be thrilled and honored to do it, sir.
