SalesTalk Technologies: How To Have Effective Sales Conversations With Harry Hardman
Salespeople take the path of the least resistance. Rich Blakeman's guest in this episode is Harry Hardman, the Senior Vice-President at SalesTalk Technologies. Salestalk is a leader in Conversation Intelligence that helps sellers say the right thing at the right time during sales conversations. In this episode, Harry talks with Rich about how the messaging is often lost between the inbound salespeople and the outbound field sales rep. The messaging has to be consistent to keep the momentum going. Tune in and discover how you can sell your product during customer dialogue from start to finish. Don't miss this episode!
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SalesTalk Technologies: How To Have Effective Sales Conversations With Harry Hardman
You talk about AI For Sales, whether it starts with AI or ends with sales. We've got a guest with us that is sales. Harry Hardman is undoubtedly a leader in the coaching space, the consulting space, and has a resume longer than my arm as far as the things he's done in his life in a sales chair. I look forward to our conversation. Harry, welcome. If you wouldn't mind, please introduce yourself, and let everyone know the elbow to wrist version of Harry Hardman.
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure being here. I'm looking forward to our conversation. I am the Vice President at SalesTalk Technologies. Our website is a good synopsis of what we do at SalesRelevance.com. We're all about trying to bring sales relevance to every conversation. I've spent all of my career in sales. It's been a long time when I started. I had brown hair and one chin. You can tell it's been a while. I've been in technology all of my careers, primarily for major corporations. A few years ago, I took the job with SalesTalk, and I have been leading the effort since then.
We'll get into some good conversations about each of those pieces of the puzzle. I'm going to have us start at a rather unusual place. What I'd like to do is to personally get to know six-year-old Harry. I want to think about before your parents have a lot of influence on you, before your teachers, school and experience of life have a lot of influence on you. When you were in the summertime and you were just having fun, what kinds of things do you remember of six-year-old Harry? What did you like to do best?
That has been a very long time ago but I definitely remember it. I grew up in El Paso, Texas out in the desert. I love to go out in the desert with my friends. Those were back in the days where you could go out and do those types of things, and your parents wouldn't worry about you as long as you were home before dark.
You could leave in the morning as long as you're home for dinner. Nobody asks where you were.
If my dad whistled, then you better be home by then. As long as you're within whistle shot, you're in good shape. We love to do exploring. I love to play all sports. I played sports all my life. Summertime was primarily baseball, but we'd come up with all kinds of inventive games with all the kids up and down the block.
We loved being outside. We didn't watch much TV. Things really changed. We had one TV with four remote controls. It was me and my three sisters. My dad would say, "Go get up and change the channel." Those were the four remote controls that he had. Now, we have four TVs and one remote control. It was spent outside, enjoying nature, exploring and having a lot of fun.
When you never go alone, you never lose alone.
It doesn't sound very much different from mine. Mine was not in El Paso. It was outside of Chicago but spent in and around the creek. We did everything, we were pirates who had sword fights, made up stories and brought other friends in, and play games. Ran down the middle of the creek. Somebody's mother would make lunch wherever you were and call us in, or we would eat outside and then we'd go back at it. About 5:00 or 6:00 we'd figure we were about done for the day. Bicycles were the mode of transportation, and that was just it. How does that connect to Harry now? How do you connect that love of play, adventure, sports and an active lifestyle? How do you connect that to your career in where you are now?
It has been an evolutionary process as it is for all of us. That playing and the love for the outdoors went into more organized sports. I played baseball, football, basketball, believe it or not, and track. I played football, the college level. As I went from being an athlete, I am morphed into coaching. As I had children, I wanted to stay active in sports. I really enjoyed being on the field as a coach. It took great joy in nurturing kids and teaching them the way that my dad and my coaches taught me. That's transferred over from my career as well.
Sports taught me a lot pretty much all the fundamentals in my personal and professional life. All the things to me that are important, discipline, team sports, being respectful, having a role, all of the things that I learned as part of winning and losing. The difference being a competitor but competing fairly, and giving all the effort on the field. All of those dynamics that I learned by playing sports are part of my everyday life and all of our lives every day.
I learned quite a bit being an athlete and it made me uniquely qualified to have a profession in sales. It is a hard profession. It's a very rewarding profession, but you win or you lose in sales. There are no second-place ribbons or medals. There are a lot of things that I transferred over from my athletic career into my professional career. I was very fortunate to be successful as a sales rep, and as I evolve from that, I have taken the same thing, I've taken great joy. As I've become a little bit more senior and gone to a sales leader, I enjoy mentoring and coaching younger sales professionals and helping them evolve their careers.
There are only two ways to answer this question. Which creates the most energy in your mind, the desire to win or hating to lose?
If I'm totally honest with you, I hate to lose.
I don't know a successful sales leader that doesn't answer the question the same way. You can celebrate winning. It's great to celebrate winning, but the taste in your mouth when you lose and you're wondering, "What could I have done differently? What did I miss? Who did I miss covering off on? What did I misunderstand about what the client was trying to accomplish?" All of those things go through your mind as you second guess yourself, “I just hate to lose.”
SalesTalk Technologies: With the relevant conversations through the sales process, AI is going to be a consistent and ongoing part of the entire sales function.
There's no worse feeling and there's no better feeling than winning. I learned something, you never went alone and you try never to lose alone either, but you always feel like you do, especially in a leadership role. I hate losing as a leader because all of the sentiments that you just hit on are even worse. It's like, “Now, I let myself down, I let my team down.”
I completely agree but I just had to ask you the question because you’ve got to know where a man stands. Let's jump into the AI For Sales side. Tell me about AI in your company. In the work that you do, how does AI play a role in any part of your business?
It's an integral part of our business. Our company uses our AI engine, along with our company's sales content, historical data from their CRM, such as where has the company been historically successful? Which title within a company, within a particular industry, have we been successful with a particular solution? That type of historical data, plus any digital information known about someone like some ZoomInfo or LinkedIn.
We take that amalgamation of data. Based on all of those components, we develop what we call talk tracks. Those are unique, conversations based on that unique individual's persona that starts with automatic opening statements that should be relevant to that person. As the conversation evolves and more is known about that person based on those responses, the conversation evolves based on those responses. AI is a fundamental foundation for them.
How do your clients react when you first get into the conversation? How wide of a spectrum do you have in terms of reaction based on their understanding of, fear of, or their current adaptation to anything else AI, as it comes to the sales profession?
It runs the gamut. The one thing we all are guilty of and a lot of times, the hardest thing to overcome is the status quo. It's that whole thing, “Beatings will continue until morale improves.” As I said, I've always worked for major corporations. CRM has always been the cornerstone but the bane of every salesperson and sales manager's existence. If it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist.
From a back-office perspective, there are a lot of real reasons for that to happen. There are a lot of legitimacy. CRMs report the news. They don't help make the news, which is what salespeople need to do. I use this and it's not politically correct anymore but since I am a sales rep, I feel comfortable in saying it. There are three truths about salespeople.
Salespeople take the path of least resistance.
Number one, we're coin-operated. Number two, we're like water. We take the path of least resistance. Number three, we can only remember three things at once, and two of them were compensation-related. As long as you manage to those truths and overall, it's not fair but it's fun. If salespeople see a direct correlation to saying, “If I'm going to take on another tool,” and what they love to do every day or every week is update the CRM. Every sales rep loves to do that. “If I'm going to take on another tool, if I don't see a direct correlation to making me better, if it's got to be easy, it's got to have a direct correlation to my success, or it's not going to happen.”
The early adopters and the people that had the foresight in this to see, "This is something that can make me better." We've taken the fundamental step of saying, "If you press a couple of buttons here during the course of your conversation, everything on the backend that you spend a lot of time updating on your CRM gets updated, it's done." "Okay." They see the light.
Any change is tough but we've seen again with the work from anywhere, the dynamic that we're all in now and where we will be in for the foreseeable future, a lot of things have changed. We're all now inside salespeople. The majority of our calls are being done via Zoom. We are getting back to face-to-face calls but the predominance of calls are either being done over the phone or via video conference. Being able to capture the key elements of the call through clicks of a button, and helping even an established sales rep make sure that they're going through all the phases of the call that they should be going on, is something that we're seeing a lot of traction with.
Connect that back to your conversation about, “I don't want to win alone, and I for sure don't want to lose alone.” Part of what you're talking about is also wrapping in a function that's traditionally been either held or an assist held by marketing in terms of developing language for personas. Being able to tie down if not in your case, what you can do tying down to individuals, as I understand it from the way you described it. Marketing in the past, being able to tie down to fairly decent ideal client profiles and personas. In this case, getting much closer to the target than a generic marketing profile might have been able to get in the past.
Even more specifically, you have the inbound marketing, you've created all of these great campaigns. You've done all of this great work. All of that inbound messaging, I use the analogy of a relay race, and this is topical now with the Olympics going on. Most relays are lost between the first and the second leg because the momentum is just not there. As the second leg, they have to be running at the same time. They need to be right in step or that baton gets dropped. That is what we've seen between the inbound campaigns and the messaging that happens there. That could be either between the marketing people and the inbound salespeople, or even between the inbound salespeople and then the field sales reps.
Not only does that inbound messaging need to be the same, but the outbound messaging needs to be consistent too. Far too many times, what's happening at the corporate level and by the time that handoff comes to the field level, that messaging and all of that stuff is totally different. All of those great efforts that brought that person to the table get lost, and it's very unfortunate.
I've been having this conversation about the challenge of especially selling a complex sale. Nowadays, you can't see around a Zoom room who's typing what chat notes to who, you're not in a room, so you can't have that sense of reading the room in terms of where the degrees of influence are, and who's influencing who amongst maybe the 5 to 9 people that are being involved in the decision. You've got a much more challenging opportunity to make a complex sale. How does that come into play when AI is involved? Do you treat them as a bunch of individuals, or can you pull that together in terms of the sale of a solution and the people involved? How does that work?
SalesTalk Technologies: Most relays are lost between the first and the second leg because the momentum is not there.
It has to be a combination of both because we are all unique individuals. We all have a unique persona. We all have a unique way of looking at things and we all have different responsibilities. You're right. All the things that we took for granted, being in a room and doing all the things that you just talked about, we don't have that advantage anymore. It put us at a distinct disadvantage.
You have to use all the tricks in the book. You have to look at, "What do I know about all these different people? What do all the different profiles say? What do we know about them holistically? All of the different tools, either from an AI perspective, from all the different data mining things that we have, need to come together in order to help you carve together the right strategy to go after that. It is in and of itself complex. That complexity is magnified because you're looking through a monocular, not through the wide-angle lens, and that does make it an extraordinary challenge.
Take your company hat off, and look into wherever Harry thinks the future of sales is going as we start to morph out of this change that we've built for ourselves. Where does AI go next? What's the next frontier in sales where AI can make a difference?
If you look at our two companies, ScaleX takes it from the very beginning from the prospecting, and it’s saving 75% of a rep's time, making them focus on the higher end of what they need to be doing. Getting those initial things going. All the way from the suspect to the prospect, and then the relevant conversations, on through the sales process, AI is going to be a consistent and ongoing part of the entire sales function.
It's not going away. It's going to continue to insinuate itself to help us focus on the key parts. Not only do you have your part of the pie, our part of the pie, but also you have all of the cadence products to make sure that you're contacting the sales prospects in the right way in the right time. All of these different products are helping sales reps be as effective as they can in the most consistent way possible. I see all of this only being more consistent. If you look at the announcement of ZoomInfo buying Chorus, you're going to see a consolidation of some big players, so there will be more of one throat to choke type of scenario. It's going to continue to be a bigger part of our lives as salespeople.
Let's flip that question because you're running into heads of sales enablement, a relatively new profession, or their new bosses and even newer profession call the head of rev ops. If you get into conversations in those professions a lot of times these days, the things you're talking about are the tech stack that serves the sales function or the sales and marketing function, or the marketing, sales and CX function. How do we end up talking about the sales profession without talking about, "What tools you got? I don't know. What tools you got?"
It's somewhat inexorable. One of the other dynamics that we're seeing is that inside salespeople are now reporting to the CMO, to make sure that that continuity of message is happening at least initially. The traditional lines of sales ops, which is now revenue ops, it was formerly relegated, "You guys run the CRMs. You're doing our dashboards. You're doing all that stuff." CX was not even part of the conversation months ago. It's a relatively new experience. Omni-channel communications, it was either phone showing up or maybe a video call. You have to be able to communicate in any way or every way on any particular product.
It's up to the individual to make the difference and win.
Whatever way the client wants to be communicated to.
Selling from anywhere and at any time in any way. I think the new matrix is yet to be defined. What was traditionally the roles and responsibilities within an organization, revenue is going to be the net result. Who's responsible for what is going to continue to evolve. The traditional CRO, CMO, CXO is going to continue to evolve as well. You painted some interesting scenarios that even a few months ago weren't even part of the conversation. They're absolutely germane to every discussion that's going on now.
Most of the time, it settles down at least in our world internally to a company. It settles down to where the budget lies. Just like it does with clients, it turns around, settles down with them as to where the budget lies. That's another one of those complexities that AI can't quite help us with yet is to discover where the budget lies.
If we have a little minesweeper thing and can sniff that out or something along those lines, that would be awesome.
We do have one of those, and it's as easy as that. It's called a good sales executive asking the right question to the right person at the right time.
That was the point I was going to make. As important as all of these different tools are, at the end of the day, the most important resource in this whole thing is a sales executive. That is never going to go away because people still buy from people. The more prepared you can make the sales executive so that he or she are the most effective in every conversation, to me, being Competent, Relevant and Memorable on every call is what CRM should stand for. The more you can make a person a CRM-type of a salesperson, the best tools that you can give them to do that, at the end of the day, that's the best I can do as a sales leader and for a company. It's up to that individual to do the difference between winning or losing.
I've got a friend in Australia that it's hard for a guy that's been in sales for 44 years to come up with new lessons. Something that isn't just a morph of from something I've heard someplace else. The lesson to me was you need to treat your prospects from day one, the way you would treat them if they had been your client for a year.
SalesTalk Technologies: It's not about the solutions; it's about really understanding their business, being a subject matter expert initially and sustainably throughout the course of the relationship.
If you treat them like prey and it's a hunch, then you're going to get one result, win or lose, kill or be killed. If you play as you've already won, treat your prospect like you've already had them as a client for a year, and you're showing them exactly how your company is going to treat them. When they're a client, only you do that during the selling process. It's the human part of this transaction. It may take advantage of a lot of AI information but it is not the AI side of this transaction.
It's the human side. The legacy sales tactics and all of the things that you and I grew up doing, that's the quickest way to get a click or an end call. People don't buy that way anymore. That doesn't work anymore. One of the biggest challenges is that people's threshold of pain for that type of stuff is at an all-time low. It's about the value. It's about, “What can I bring you?”
It's not about the solutions. It's about understanding your business, being a subject matter expert initially and sustainably throughout the course of the relationship. It's not the sales journey necessarily, it's about that relationship from the first conversation on. The way you said that, I haven't heard it expressed that way, but it's powerful and true.
It has been a delightful conversation. We've covered a lot of ground, and we've barely scratched the surface of all of the things to touch in the subject of AI for Sales. I'm extremely pleased that you took the time out of your day to join me.
It's always a real pleasure speaking with you. I have enjoyed this time.
I couldn't have asked for more. To all of our readers, I hope that you take a minute and pay attention to what Harry is up to. Keep an eye on what he and his firm are doing when you're looking in LinkedIn because there's a lot going on in the AI for Sales. Harry is the man. Thank you very much. I appreciate you being here.
You bet. Bye.
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About Harry Hardman
Harry Hardman is an Award-Winning Executive Sales Leader successful in refining and executing innovative sales strategies and best practices to consistently exceed revenue goals while continuing to advance company objectives. Harry has a solid record in leading business turnarounds and restructurings by leveraging a proven sales playbook, and by integrating technology to resolve customer issues.
Throughout his career, Harry has been a collaborative leader who excels at mentoring and coaching to challenge team members’ performance and inspire growth. He incorporates ‘tools of the trade,’ including CRM software, and a range of training methodologies (Challenger Model, Solution Selling, Miller Heiman, etc.) to drive growth by creating new business while accurately forecasting future results.
