Selling Your Way IN isn't just a book; it's a roadmap to sales success. Join Kristie K. Jones, the author, and Mark Cox for an insightful conversation about her journey and her passion for empowering others to succeed in sales. With a wealth of experience working with early-stage startups, Kristie delves into the complexities of the modern sales landscape. She explores the dual nature of sales challenges—business and personal—and offers strategies for professionals to identify their ideal customer profiles and maximize their potential. Discover how to identify your unique selling style, build lasting client relationships, harness the power of mentorship, and prepare for the future of sales.
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Winning Strategies For Selling Your Way In With Kristie K. Jones
Kristie’s Journey
Kristie, welcome to the show. It's great to meet you.
Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to chat with you.
I'm super excited to chat with you. We're talking about Selling Your Way IN: The Playbook for Setting Your Income and Owning Your Life by Kristie Jones. As everybody who tunes in to the show knows, we only publish episodes with folks whose books I really like. I like this book. I'll tell you from what perspective I think it's dynamite. It's such a helpful tool for somebody who's going into sales perhaps in the earlier part of their career.
When they go into a new organization, you and I both know that the onboarding plans are not magnificent with most companies. This book is such a wonderful guide for someone to drive their own onboarding plan and shorten that time to success. We're going to get into all of that but to start, maybe you could share the short story of your professional journey through university and starting as a buyer with The Jones Store Company. Tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are.
You're right. I went to the University of Kansas. I'm a proud Jayhawk, or maybe not during football season but I can't wait for basketball season to start. That's when we fly our flag with pride. I did start in retail. I spent my first eight years out of college in a retail environment. I was working initially for the Mercantile Group, which doesn't exist anymore, out of Cincinnati. The Jones Store Company was one of their stores in the Kansas City area. We had about 7 or 8 stores in the Kansas City area.
I cut my teeth working in the stores. Ironically, as a department manager, I started by working in the commission department. I ran the cosmetics department and the shoe department. Famous-Barr, which is part of the May Group, then hired me and moved me. I relocated to St. Louis so I could work there. Since they were rebuilding two stores, I got an opportunity there to close down the old physical building and move inventory and everything into the new building.
I then got a chance to go to the buying office. I spent my last about 5 years out of those 8 in the buying offices and the downtown store. A lot of my negotiation skills came from that as well as analytical skills people. I say to people, “It sounds glamorous, but no one invited me to Paris to set fashion trends.” My boss wanted to make sure I didn't run out of pink tees in the middle of summer in size medium. It was a lot of math and a lot of analytics.
I started my sales career in retail sales and then got disenchanted. That was a big Fortune 500 company with lots of red tape and lots of ivory tower-ish type things. I grew up in an entrepreneurial small business family. When I decided to make a leap out of the Fortune 500 world, I landed in a company with twelve employees in the SaaS space.
It’s a pure startup. That's a small SaaS company.
I'm so old that we didn't call it SaaS. We called it a subscription model back then. We had a subscription model. I spent ten years there cutting my teeth. I did everything but code. If the server needed rebooting, I knew how to reboot the server. Initially, when I first got to the company, the server was down the hall in a closet on the third floor, which is horrifying to those in cybersecurity. It wasn't even locked. If you needed Post-its, that was me. If the copier was jammed, that was me. If you needed to help close a deal, that was also me. In a company that is that size, you wear a lot of hats.
It was an amazing opportunity. I worked directly for the owner for those ten years. About 2 or 2 and a half years in, I had full revenue responsibility, so net new sales and business development team. By 2003, we had a BDR team. We were early adopters of that. We also had a customer success team, which when I first got there, we called account management. I've dabbled a little bit in everything.
From there, I loved the SaaS tech world. I fell in love with that, so I stayed in that swim lane, as I call it, and worked for some bigger companies. At some point, after leaving that company, after ten years, I landed at a VC-backed company, and then I got the VC-backed bug. I wanted to work with B2B SaaS companies that were VC-backed on top of everything else. I stayed in that world for a while until 2016 when I got restructured out of a SaaS company that was VC-backed to series E. I had gone from a lot of Series-A type companies or seed companies to the big dog.
In the midst of looking for my next VP of sales role, the universe conspired to take me in a different direction. One of my Kristieisms is when the universe speaks, you should listen. The universe was speaking very strongly to me. I had always wanted to dip my toe into the consulting role, but I still had a child in school and not off to college yet. I always had intended to do that after the fact, but it was very clear that that was not supposed to happen in my timeline. It was supposed to happen in the universe's timeline. The rest is history. I had been doing the right thing by people all along. I'm a giver. I say I've got 30 minutes for everyone.
Selling Your Way IN: When the universe speaks, you should listen.
I thought that was really interesting. I liked that idea in the book of saying whenever somebody reaches out, you make sure you offer them 30 minutes. Given the turnover and transition in professional B2B sales, I'm sure your calendar's packed with those kinds of meetings.
I'm getting a lot of those types of calls. Not long ago, an SVP at the organization that I was reorg-ed out of reached out and is looking for a new opportunity. An SDR leader that I placed a few months ago also reached out. In that case, that was a different situation, which is something that we are dealing with. The organization decided everybody was going to be back in the office five days a week and he was hybrid. Since they were hybrid, he had moved 2 hours outside of the city and was making that commute 2 days a week but wasn't willing to make it 5. I got two of those calls.
I spent a lot of my time helping those companies that are in that early series A B2B SaaS world, even transitioning from founder-led selling into hiring their first sales rep and putting all the sales processes together. I spend my days mostly working with companies that are $0 to $5 million in revenue and need to proselytize and document those types of things.\
Role As A Buyer
That’s fantastic. Thanks for the share. Tell me a little bit about your role as a buyer. Outside of the negotiations, how did that help you have a little bit more empathy for what buyers are going through? Also, tell us about what they see when salespeople are coming in to visit them.
I spent one week almost every month in New York negotiating, trying to negotiate my best deal and trying to make sure I've got the assortment that I need. I don't ever believe that negotiation has to be 50/50 but it does have to be win-win. There has to be something in it for everyone. I was bonused on margin, so gross margin was really important to me. Now, I live in a world where people are like, “What’s profit?” That was important. Each $0.5 mattered. It could be because the quantities of material or clothing that you were buying, all of that made a difference.
There's a great example of something where if you really understood that buyer and how they were compensated what's important to them personally and then professionally for the organization, you start to align to figure out how you can best help them. It may not be top line fee for the actual service, but if they understood you, your business, your world, and what was most important to you, they might be able to, at the negotiation table rather than trying to split a pie, make the pie a bit bigger for everybody.
When I'm talking to clients and taking them through as I'm building out sales processes, I make it very clear that there are two types of problems. There's the business problem and the financial impact that's having on the business, and then from the economic buyer or the influencer standpoint, there's a personal problem and the impact that that's having on them personally, their career, and their day-to-day life. I'm always telling my teams to look at both problems. You said that based on my background, I was trying to do the best thing for the company, but I also had a personal stake in that game very much.
That's the one that we get tied to emotionally so much. We had Alice Heiman on the show. Thank you, Miller Heiman, for one of those core models that has really stood the test of time. I know you've got a lot of respect for a lot of other sales process books out there. Miller Heiman, to me, is something that's so universal because there are still multiple people who influence a sale. You have to get a consensus. They have personal and professional needs and wants. It's universal.
You dropped Alice's name. Alice and Liz Heiman are part of a networking group that I belong to that's a fairly exclusive group of female sales consultants called Women Sales Experts. Trish was a member, but Jill Konrath started it. Trish was an early member. Lori Richardson was running it. I've been spending a lot of time over the last few years with Alice and Liz. They are products of the Miller Heiman School of Business.
It's a great gang. 6 or 7 of that group have been on the show. Lori has been on the show. Lisa Manuson has been on the show. Without looking at the list, we're at 100 episodes. They were magnificent conversations. They’re all thought leaders. One of the things I love, and you speak a lot about this in the book, and what I'm jealous of is it's such a great peer group and support group it is for all of you. In the early days a couple of years ago, when I used to do an episode with one of them, they would then send me an email saying, “You should put these three people on your show.” That's how I ended up getting all these great people. It's such a good peer group because they look out for each other.
You know from reading the book that one of my other mottos is, “Your circle matters.” Without having this circle, I don't think my business would be where it is. I've never been a part of any kind of group, female or not, that has been so transparent about what they charge, how they decide to charge, sharing contracts, and sharing pitfalls.
Your circle matters.
One of the first conferences I attended of the Women Sales Pros was in Minneapolis where two of the presenters were talking about how their business was on the brink of failure. It was very vulnerable. People were passing tissues around. I'm like, “I did not think I was coming to a conference where I was going to need a tissue.”
The fact of the matter is that a lot of times, men don't talk about failures in a very open and transparent way. The people who were brave enough to share that year about the things that had gone on in their personal and professional lives that caused them to be on the brink of failure were doing it so that we wouldn't end up in the same place. It was so the rest of us in the room wouldn't end up in the same place. It was from a place of giving.
Developing A Personal Plan
Your book's very giving. Let's talk about some of the positivity you're putting into the universe with the book. The book is structured into three great sections. The first one is so unique that we don't see a lot of it. We're going to talk a lot about it. Section one is developing your personal plan for becoming a rockstar professional. I love the term rockstar for a couple of reasons we'll get to in a second. According to Harvard, if you graduate college or university, you've got a 50% chance of being in a professional sales job at some point in time in your career.
That doesn't surprise me.
Everybody's going to be in a professional sales job from this point forward. You talk a lot about, “Take a look inside first. Who were you? let's understand who you are.” What drove that for you, and what guidance can you give to folks when they're trying to do that assessment of who they really are?
I see so many sales professionals who are not in the right sales role. They're not in the right sales role selling the right product or service into the right industry at a mid-market versus SMB versus enterprise and working for the right company or even the right sales leader. The better you know yourself, things like, “What comes naturally to me? Where are my superpowers?” as well as things like, “How do I like to be rewarded?” come to you. What I think people don't understand is the breadth of sales roles that are out there. As you know because you read the book, I grew up in a family where we owned a real estate company.
You were kitchen table entrepreneurs.
My mother was 100% commissioned. My dad only took a salary when he didn't have to give it up to make payroll for the rest of his employees. It was everything from a 100% commission sales rep to a 100% base salary person and everything in between. What's your risk profile? How do you like to be rewarded? How do you like to be managed?
If you've been in sales, this book is not only for newbies but people who are maybe not in the top 10% yet and can't figure out why. Do you need a quicker sales cycle? Are you struggling to keep the sales cycle alive, if you will, over 6 to 9 months? Are you an instant gratification person? Do you have patience for, “I like the game. I like playing the game and all the things it would take to play the game over six months,” let's say?
You mentioned you downloaded the workbook. There's a lot of opportunity in the workbook to answer those questions and put them in writing. You won't figure it all out, but there's a lot of it you already know but you haven't gone to a quiet spot to think these things over. When you do, then you'll be able to say, okay, “I'm an instant gratification person. I need a sales cycle that's no more than 60 days. My risk profile is at about 70/30. I need a little bit more base salary and a little less variable,” or vice versa. Maybe you’re like, “I want unlimited potential. I would take a 30% base salary and a 70% variable commission plan.”
Once you start to figure those things out about yourself, then all of a sudden, your sales world narrows. I've got a passion for whatever reason. I have a passion for healthcare. For personal reasons or other reasons, I really do well with healthcare professionals, or I do well with HR professionals, or I don't mind dealing with those finance folks. That CFO doesn't scare me. When you start to figure that out, then the sales world isn't this big. I want you to find your swim lane because that's where you have the best chance of getting to the top 10%.
Once you start to figure those things out about yourself, then all of a sudden, your sales world narrows.
It's such great advice. This is where the book really resonates. It's right at the beginning but it stuck with me. Far too often we're, we're all driven by this outcome. You’re like, “I want the job. I want to say that I worked for Salesforce. I want to say I did this. I want to say this,” and then you take a step back and go, “Let me think about me. What do I like doing?”
The other thing I think is a really good thought for folks is you may jump into an organization and realize you are in the wrong spot. That's okay. It's not failure. It's saying, “What's right for me?” Sometimes, you have to try a few things, get out there, and figure out what's right for you and what's wrong for you. People always say, “Do what you love.” What I love doing is playing drums and hockey. I wasn't good enough at either of them to be paid a lot for either. I happen to really love doing this, but this is something I love that people will pay for. It's okay to try some different things.
You snuck in, in my view, what’s almost the most important part there. You said, “What kind of leader do I work well with?” No matter who you are in sales, the X factor of professional sales is your leader. There is a lack of great sales management out there in the world. For lots of good and logical reasons, venture capital is the cause of some of them.
I don't disagree with you.
Principles And Practice
I like that takeaway, thinking about yourself and playing to your strengths. Get into your swim lane and know what's right for you. We then get into two principles and practices of a rockstar sales process. One of the things that is an indisputable truth in B2B sales is to start with the ICP. Know who you're selling to. You spent a lot of time talking about this. Why was that the first thing you jumped into in terms of the sales process? Why is that so important for anybody out there tuning in to this show?
It's probably a product of my working with startups who, a lot of times when I get there, don't have a defined ICP. I talked to a client who said, “We want to talk to companies who are in growth mode.” I said, “You only have two AEs. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have a human resource issue. You don't have enough humans to decide that that's your ICP.”
They have a very specific industry, so that helps. I said, “First off, ZoomInfo doesn't tell you that. Apollo doesn't tell you that. Databases don't tell you that. They don't have a checkbox for, “Are they in growth mode or are they not in growth mode?” We can't even go in and filter on that, so that makes that a bad ICP characteristic, if you will.” It's not even a firmographic. It's a subjective item.
A part of it is the product that I work in that $0 to $5 million world where we're still trying to identify that. I told them, “You can't boil the ocean with 2 humans and even 20 humans. Even if you had twenty account executives on your sales team, you wouldn't be able to boil the ocean. What do you really want to be known for? What do you want to own?” I use my personal example all the time. You may have had Brynne Tillman on the show.
We have.
Good because I was like, “If not, add her to the list.”
We talked to Brynne.
I had Brynne help me revitalize my LinkedIn profile. At the time, there were X number of characters that I could use to describe what I do. I gave her my punchline and she said, “Too broad.” I said, “Okay.” I did it again and she was like, “Too broad.” We did that a lot of times, so I got irritated and was like, “What do you think I should say?” She goes, “You work with companies and startup founders at $0 to $5 million who don't have any formal or documented processes or maybe don't have more than one or two salespeople. What you do is very specific.” It sounded terrifying.
You feel like you're cutting off the rest of the market.
That's right. I'm like, “I'm a sales trainer, a sales coach, and a process expert.” She goes, “So what? Do you know how many sales trainers are out there? Do you really want to compete with all those people?” I'm like, “No, I don't think so.” She said, “You don't have to because most of us don't want to deal with VC-backed early-stage startups between $0 and $5 million. If you say that, it will narrow your world.” It was the scariest thing I did and the best thing I did. I credit her for pushing me in that direction because my elevator pitch is very short. People go, “That's really specific.” I'm the first person people think of when they need something that fits that specific swim lane that I live in.
We love Brynne. For folks reading, you can go back to an episode of the show. Brynne Tillman is an expert on leveraging LinkedIn for sales. She's got really practical advice for doing so, like this. Frankly, the advice she gave you is business strategy. It's not a LinkedIn suggestion. It's a core business strategy. Although our ideal client profile is larger than yours, they still have these issues where you have folks selling into a market, and they may have lots of clients but they haven't been quite specific about their ideal client profile and the one they want to replicate. You get into the Pareto principle with them.
You’re like, “Who are our best clients? Why do we want to replicate them?” The more specific you get about your ICP, the more the ICP values what you bring to the table. The unique value to your market, they'll realize it because they're your ideal client profile and they'll pay for it. You get away from negotiation, price-getting, and all those kinds of things.
I really like you sharing your focus with the business. A lot of us can refine that. When we start to think about our sales plans for Q1 of 2025 based on when you're tuning in to this episode, sometimes, we need to recalibrate those things and take a look at what's working and what isn't. It’s like, “Which clients are trying to negotiate us into the ground or think we're a commodity?” If somebody views you as a commodity, they're the wrong ICP. They're not seeing the unique competitive differentiation or value you bring to the table. One of Kristie’s is the fact that all she does is work with VC-backed startups, so she understands that world so well.
Even to take it a step further, your company that you work for may have an ICP, but you probably have a personal ICP. A lot of the clients I work for are like, “We're industry agnostic. We have software that can help accounting teams.” That's industry agnostic. You personally might not be industry agnostic. You may do better with manufacturing. You may do better with software companies. You may do better with how healthcare. You may do better with a logistics company.
That's what that whole second section of the book is. It is customizing and tailoring what the company ought to be providing you. If you came out of section one, which is understanding what your superpowers are, how you like to be rewarded, and what you do better than other people, then you may say to your sales leader, “Instead of going after these 70 industries, I'd like to go after these 7 because I understand those.”
Even within personas, in most companies, there are 3 to 5 personas that you can sell into everything from the economic buyer to the champion or influencer. It’s the same thing. You’re like, “The IT team may need to be involved from a security standpoint or this and that. I don't do so well with them so I'm going to start with a different department. I may get a partner and bring in a solution consultant or a sales engineer to help me with that other side.”
You and I know that not always do we walk into a situation in a company where everything is baked out, if you will. Some things are half-baked or some things are frozen. If there is any baking going on at all, even if it's half-baked, you should really be thinking to yourself, “Even if I'm being put into a territory, within that territory, what industry, what personas, or what size companies?” If you understand that, you're going to be able to play to your strengths.
The guy next to you or the girl next to you, let them go after the industries you don't care about or the personas that aren't doing so well. Let them go hunt big game. I always say to people, “Enterprise sounds sexy but it's hard. There aren't that many of them. The majority of the world lives in the SMB and mid-market space. Go get mid-market. It’s a faster sales cycle. It’s easier to make decisions. There are fewer pieces of red tape. Legal doesn't get involved all the time.” You have to think through all of those things. Even when you've chosen a company that says, “This is our ICP and these are our personas,” you have to be saying to yourself, “Where within that can I really shine and win?”
That’s great advice. One of the things that's nice about that is if you go after consistent ICP, they value the competitive differentiation you bring to the table. You learn. In every sell cycle you're involved in, you're not learning everything in the universe. Let's pick an example. You sell into industrial manufacturing. You're understanding the trends, the issues, the challenges, the obstacles, what they face, and all those kinds of things.
What I found really interesting when you were sharing your thoughts on knowing your industry is you had a great stat. The Training Industry Inc. and ValueSelling Associates conducted a study to determine how B2B sales interactions are perceived by buyers. They found that 75% of buyers say that sales reps don't demonstrate knowledge of their industry structure and only 37% of sales reps provide unique industry insights.
In onboarding new clients, I'm part of that. A lot of times, I do what I call hiring help. I'm helping companies hire their first few sales reps, and then I stick around as part of that package to help do some onboarding. I train them on four things, which are industry, product, sales process, and sales tools. The very first thing I do, and I can spend up to a week doing this, is industry. Not only do you understand the industry, but where your place in the ecosystem is as a company. The company that you're working for, where do you land in the ecosystem of that? Manufacturing is a big industry. Where within that specifically does your company play best?
I couldn't agree more. When you think of the life of a salesperson, one of the things you want to be doing in any sales interaction is adding value to that conversation in some capacity. You want to be making some form of deposit before you ask for a withdrawal. Frequently, the folks who win sell cycles are the ones where the buyer felt like they understood the buyer's world better than somebody else. If you do understand that buyer's world better than somebody else, then you can figure out how to take them to a better place in the future, but you have to understand it.
One of the opportunities for everybody tuning in is in that next call, whether it is an existing client, an SDR reach-out call, or a mid-cycle call to continue a discovery, do we have value, insight, and knowledge that is of some value to the recipient on the other end? A lot of times, we underestimate how much our organization knows about our client base. We're not leveraging everything in our four walls to pull the information from client success, the product team, the CEO, the executive team, or even our VP of finance to say, “What do we all know about the people we're selling into so that we can better arm our sales organizations to have intelligent conversations that provide value and insight?”
Agreed. There's a wealth of information out there. I'm always surprised when I ask candidates as I'm interviewing them, “Did you join your local association?” The answer is no most of the time. I'm like, “If you want to really understand your industry and become an industry expert, it probably costs you a minimal amount of money to join your fill-in-the-blank. There are associations for everything. If you're selling to morticians, The National Mortician Association exists as well. There are associations out there. You should be attending your local association. Meaning, the regional or national if your company will let you go. Those things are invaluable. They’re not that expensive. It’s probably an hour or two a month.
Hiring For Professional Sales Jobs
That’s great advice. You snuck in there when you're helping organizations hire and then you help them onboard. Onboarding is a pet peeve of ours. I experienced a wonderful onboarding plan a long time ago. I had a beautiful head of hair like yours in those days. Those days are gone when organizations would onboard you for 90 days in a different country in a sales education center that was built for onboarding. Those days are over. I really like everything in the book that's talking about how we do that. Let's talk about hiring for a second. What are the attributes that you look for when you're interviewing somebody for a professional sales job?
Success begets success. First and foremost, I want somebody who has been successful in a prior role, or even coming out of college who's been an athlete, or who's been a leader at some sort of club or something at school. There's a physiological reaction to winning. If you felt it before, you know what it feels like and you want to feel it again. I want people who are ambitious. I want people who are independent. I'm going to provide them some structure, but I always say, “Please don't check your brain at the door when you walk through it every day.”
There's a physiological reaction to winning. If you felt it before, you know what it feels like, and you want to feel it again.
This is a high-rejection sport, so I need people who are gritty and resilient. I need people who are going to be able to get up every day and hear the noes and then keep on going. I also want people who are enterprising but also innovative. In the world I live in, the founder is probably a tech founder and he probably has sold very little. It is what he needed to do to get past the founder-led selling stage. I want to make sure that people are coming with some sort of personal process.
I do spend a lot of time talking to people about, “Tell me about the current process,” and then I ask them, “How have you customized that? What's your personal sales process? Which part of that sales cycle is your strength and that you're playing to? How has that made a difference in your close rate?” and those types of things.
I also spend a lot of time looking for the intangibles, so to speak. The top ten percenters are doing things outside of work to better themselves personally and professionally that the other 90% are confused by and aren't doing. When I ask a specific question, like, “What three things do you do consistently regardless of the company you're in or the sales role that you're currently in that you truly believe, “If I do these things, I can be successful?” the top ten percenters and people who know themselves will say, “I'm at the gym every morning by 6:00. I have a tight circle of friends and we get together quarterly to support each other.
I listen to a business podcast instead of watching The Bachelor. I read a business book. I'm putting the right things in my body. I gave up drinking a few years ago because it wasn't serving me. I have a spiritual or religious practice.” Those are the tipping points. When I hear that right away, I know I'm dealing with a different type of candidate. There’s their prior success, skill, and whether they can sell what we want them to sell, but in general, those people will figure it out. They have the discipline.
That's the other thing that we haven't talked about yet. In order to stay within your ICP, in order to be a top ten percenter, or in order to do all those things and be top talent, it requires an extreme amount of discipline because there's always a Happy Hour to go to instead of going home to family or going to the gym. There's always something that can keep you from doing the right things. People with discipline know, “I need to do these things.”
I'm an eight-hour sleep girl. My friends, if we go out, I say to them, “At some point, I'm going to turn into a pumpkin.” I'm going to disappear on them. I'm going to Uber myself home because I don't need to be out until 1:00 or 2:00. That's not how I live my life anymore. I love going to happy hour, I love going out with my friends, and I love a good cocktail, but I also know that if I don't get eight hours of sleep, I'm going to be not the best version of myself the next day.
Going back to the core question, I love this idea of trying to smoke out discipline and growth orientation. Many of those things that you called out, like, “What are you reading? Do you go to the gym? What's your system? What podcast do you listen to?” and all those types of things are a combination of discipline and this growth orientation. It’s like, “I know enough to become a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all.”
It’s lifelong learning. You can't teach that. That’s an innate desire.
Carol Dweck has a great book called Mindset. She talks about the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and the impact on your own mental health, frankly. You have this fixed mindset and you don't think you can get better than any time you fail. It's like a Scarlet Letter. It crushes you. If you have this growth mindset, you go, “I lost that hockey game. I let in a couple of bad goals. Let's watch the film. Let's try and get a little bit better. I'm going to be a bit careful. I'm going to make sure I don't move before the shot next time. I'll respond instead of anticipating.”
I call it victim syndrome. We don't want to hire people who have victim syndrome. They’re like, “My territory sucks. My manager sucks. My SDR sucks. Marketing sucks.” You can identify those people right away. We can eliminate those pretty quickly.
It’s accountability. When we hire, we like intelligence, drive, and humility, and then we like passion and optimism.
I like all of those.
I'm certainly no rocket scientist. You don't have to be on the top end of the spectrum in terms of intelligence to be good at sales, but you do have to be clever, quick, intellectually curious, and all of those kinds of things.
I'm hiring for a company. The sales manager taught me a new term, which I love and wish I had known before the book came out. I would give him full credit. He calls it situational fluency. That is one of the traits he's looking for. I'll call him out. His name is Guy Caldwell, a Sales Manager at BizLibrary. I'm helping them do a bunch of hiring. He says, “I'm looking for situational fluency.” I'm like, “Wow.”
It almost feels like that's this combination of curiosity and emotional intelligence to be able to read the room and read the situation. I like that term. That one will take off.
I know. That's a good one.
The Concept Of Mindset
One thing I really like is section three of your book, Selling Your Way IN. We're talking about bringing it all together and creating abundance. There was this theme about a mindset throughout the course of the book. You shared putting positivity in the world by taking a 30-minute meeting with people. Most of the time in professional sales, those 30-minute meetings come when somebody's in between jobs.
1 in 3 people churn jobs every year. Most people in sales last about eighteen months in their current roles, even CROs. That 30-minute meeting with someone like you who's got a network is a lifeline to someone. Even if it doesn't turn into anything, the fact you took the meeting is such a great thing. Tell us a little bit more about section three and this idea of abundance versus scarcity and this concept of mindset.
That mental side of sales has played into my career and my success. That's what separates the 10% from the other 90%. This is what I call once you've gotten there, this is the get-back. This is a 30-minutes-for-everyone type of situation. I do it in a lot of different ways. I'm also a Junior Achievement instructor. I like to go to schools. I want young girls to see me as a role model. I want them to know that they can own their own business as a woman. One of the things I love about Junior Achievement is it has a financial component to every single grade lesson. Most people in the country and other countries don't have financial literacy, financial acumen, or business acumen. I really like that part about it.
I've had plenty of these people in my life. Mike Weinberg wrote the foreword to my book. He has always been one of those generous people who makes sure that he takes 30 minutes for everybody. When we got ready to do the book launch, he was in constant contact with me. He was calling me all the time and was like, “What are we doing? When are we dropping this? Here's what I'm going to send out to my people.”
The universe takes care of you. I'm not just doing it because of what I’m going to get back. I say this in the book. Since I was raised in an entrepreneurial family in the way that I was, and I call it getting my MBA at the kitchen table, I feel like I have a responsibility to help share things that I learned along the way that other people's parents couldn't, wouldn't, or didn't know how to teach them and environments that they grew up in. A lot of my friends get frustrated sometimes with things. They're like, “We didn't grow up like you.” I'm like, “You're right.”
My dad had very strong financial foundations. When I got my first job with The Jones Store Company, he said, “How soon before you can contribute to 401(k)?” I was like, “I don't know.” It turned out to be three months. He said, “From the very second that you can contribute, contribute the max that they match. The goal is 10%. If you do that right away, you'll never miss it. It's gone. Every time you get a raise, add another percentage until you get to the maximum.” I'm at the age where I can do some catch-up because there were a couple of years where I didn't always max out. Since I've owned my business, I have a personal 401(k) and I max it out every year at the government's maximum.
People aren't taught even those basic things. When I get into companies where stock options have been presented, I sit new employees down and say, “Do you even know what this means?” People go, “Does it come with stock options?” I'm like, “It sure does.” I then sit down in my office, close the door so we're private, and go, “Do you even know what a stock option is?” They're like, “Yeah. You gave me a piece of the company.” I'm like, “It could also be that you have to buy it.”
You mentioned the eighteen-month abortion. It’s where people like, “We're out of here. Abort. In eighteen months, we're gone.” People don't understand that they have to purchase those. In a lot of companies you're at, you don't want to leave without having done so. I always say to reps, “When you get a really good commission check, you should put some of that toward your stock options.”
I truly believe that I have a responsibility because I was raised in a way that other people weren't raised. If I can help people better themselves financially, whether that's because I've got some sales advice for them or I have good kitchen table advice that I learned while listening to my parents talk business every night, that's part of my give-back as well.
That’s great and indisputable. I'd be one of those people that did not have good financial. I had good book smarts financial acumen up until my mid-twenties. I had some good things happen very early in my career but that money went up in flames. That money went to bars and good times. It's all gone.
Your entertainment budget was high.
It was pretty high back in those days. I can't believe it, but it looks like we're running down on time. First of all, I want to say thank you so much for joining the show. One of the real pleasures of running this podcast is I get to read a whole bunch of amazing books by sales leaders, thought leaders, and all that good stuff and then meet the people. It has been a real pleasure meeting you. I enjoyed very much reading Selling Your Way IN: The Playbook for Setting Your Income and Owning Your Life. How do the folks who are tuning in learn more about you or engage you?
If you want to know more about the book, you can go to SellingYourWayIn.com. It will take you to a section of my website, so then you'll also be on the website if you'd like to learn more about the services I offer. What I'd really love for your audience to do is connect with me on LinkedIn, drop me a note, and let me know about their one takeaway from our conversation.
That’s an amazing ask. Thank you. We have to do that moving forward. That's a great idea. Thank you again for joining the show. Team, thank you for tuning in to the show. We do this show because we're trying to improve the performance and professionalism of B2B sales teams. Since we believe in doing that, we improve the lives of anybody associated with professional sales. Thanks for tuning in.
If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends because that's how we get great guests like Kristie. Also, we're growth-oriented. We know we're not perfect at doing this and we know your feedback is awesome for improving the show, so please keep the feedback coming. We're growth-oriented. We love constructive criticism. Send your suggestions to us on running the show or ideas for guests to MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That's my personal email. I personally respond to everybody who gives us a suggestion. Thanks for doing so. We'll see everybody next time on the show.
Thank you.
Important Links
LinkedIn - Kristie K. Jones
Selling Your Way IN: The Playbook for Setting Your Income and Owning Your Life
Professional Sales with Alice Heiman - Apple Podcasts
She Sells-Attract, Promote and Retain Great Women in B2B Sales with Lori Richardson - Apple Podcasts
How To Win 5X Deals Repeatedly with Lisa Magnuson - Apple Podcasts
The LinkedIn Whisperer with Brynne Tillman - Apple Podcasts
About Kristie K. Jones
Kristie, author of “Selling Your Way IN”, is a speaker, coach, and sales process consultant. Companies hire Kristie to elevate their sales organization because most sales leaders and professionals are discouraged and frustrated about anemic pipelines, low close rates, and missed targets.
Kristie’s willingness to get her hands dirty and her “take no prisoners” approach when helping companies drive more revenue from their Sales and Customer Success teams is what makes her so valuable to her clients. Her mission is helping companies find top talent as well as creating a sales accountability culture to ensure revenue growth.
Kristie is passionate about coaching sales teams to leverage their superpowers to reach their full potential, and she wants representatives and sales leaders to identify and embody the practices and characteristics of Top Ten Percent achievers.
