The sales landscape is changing at breakneck speed. Sales transformation isn't a luxury; it's a necessity. This isn't just about buzzwords; it's about arming your sales team for success in the modern market. Join host Mark Cox as he unpacks the secrets of sales success with industry veteran Collin Mitchell. Collin talks about how his extensive experience and passion in professional sales translate into success by sharing insights into his journey. From refining team coaching methods to reimagining conventional sales quotas, he unlocks the secrets to thriving in today's dynamic sales environment. Tune in as he shares the key behind his enduring enthusiasm for the world of sales.
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The Sales Transformation Toolbox: Essential Tools For Sales Success With Collin Mitchell
Before we get started, we've got a special offer for you as a reader of the show. We launched the next generation of our In The Funnel Sales Academy, the leading online training platform and B2B sales community that helps companies optimize their sales and generate ongoing, predictable revenue growth. For readers, we're offering 50% off your first month for any of our subscription plans. Go to SellingWell.com/Podcast and then use the promo code PODCAST, and you'll get 50% off your first month. We're looking forward to working with you. Now, onto the show.
We've got a great show for you. Our guest is Collin Mitchell. He's the Managing Partner of Leadium, a B2B lead generation agency. You'll learn from this discussion that he's been with lots of different organizations over the years in professional sales, almost every two years, investing in or running a different sales organization.
Collin is probably best known for being the host of the Sales Transformation Podcast, which is one of the top 1% of all the podcasts out there. He has an amazingly large subscriber base on that podcast and he's had about 300 different conversations with great sales leaders. In fact, I even got to be on that show with him and enjoyed the conversation, and because of that breadth of discussions, I got into a conversation with Collin where I'm very interested and understand what he has gleaned from all of those conversations.
How does he take everything he learned from those 300 conversations into a playbook for the next sales organization he takes over? We talk a lot about people and the attributes that he hires on and that we hire on and how we get through an interviewing process to try and uncover those attributes because we all know it's tough to interview salespeople these days. Collin's got a very controversial approach to quota.
They don't have them at Leadium, so we have a great conversation about how he manages a team to perform without quotas. As always, we're interested in people's journeys to this point. Collin is an amazingly successful business professional who's gone through lots of adversity along that journey in life, as many of us have. Frankly, it's an inspiring journey. I enjoyed my conversation with Collin. I think you will, too. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show and tell your friends. Here's Collin Mitchell.
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Collin, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to it. I know we've been looking to make it happen. You did such a great job on my show. I'll do my best to try to return the favor.
Every once in a while, you get a little nervous before one of these shows. I'm a little nervous because your podcast is one of the top sales podcasts out there. You're one of the top 1%. The amount of downloads is absolutely flabbergasting. As we go through this, and I'm growth-oriented, please feel free to coach me in real time on how to do these things better.
I think you'll do fine. You showed up and rocked the mic like a pro when you came on my show.
Thanks for that. There are lots of changes in your life. We were chatting about it offline. Tell us what's going on.
One thing is I joined Leadium as their VP of Sales and then became a Managing Partner there. I’ve been doing some great work and a great team. The funny story is I used to be a Leadium customer. Maybe we'll get into it, but I've had four startups. I sold three of them. Two of those businesses, Leadium, helped me scale. I was a Leadium customer before I joined Kevin and Sergey over there, and then they acquired my podcast. Sales Transformation is in its third season now. We're at almost 800 episodes. I honestly couldn't be happier with where the show is and the quality of the content that we're putting out these days.
Professional Sales Journey
You've got such a great model for this show. I enjoyed being on it and you run it well. Readers, please go check out the Sales Transformation Podcast. You're very likely already doing so, but there are small bite-sized chunks, massive amounts of content, information and value. It's a great model. I enjoyed being on the show and learning from you from that one. You did talk about little bit about your background. I think you've got an amazing background with your 15 or 16 years as a professional sales hacker and all the rest of it. Tell our readers a little bit about your journey in professional sales.
I didn't go to college. I didn't quite know what I wanted to do with my life, to be honest. I was not the most responsible young adult. My first job was moving around furniture. Prior to that, I grew up poor. I was raised by a single mom. I’m 1 of 4 boys. She did the best she could, but we struggled more often than not. I didn't know what I wanted to do other than I didn't want to be poor. Sales seemed a great way to not be poor. When I got that first sales job, I never looked back. I took it very seriously. I was the first one in the office every single day. I was the last one to leave every single day. I'm not promoting hustle culture or anything like that, but that's what it took.
I was willing to put in that hard work like some people are these days and some people aren't. That's what it took for me. That worked my way up to the top very quickly as one of the top full-cycle AEs. After that, I got my first leadership position and did that and learned a lot more new skills. I made a lot of mistakes and learned a little bit more business acumen and experience. After that, I started my first company with my wife. We grew that from $0 to $5 million in 26 months. After that, I started a few more companies, had a couple of exits, and now here I am at Leadium.
What an amazing story and an amazing journey. Thanks for sharing that and being open about it. For everyone reading, it's never a bad idea to work hard. I know at certain periods of time, we have our natural ebbs and flows. Those of you who are fans of Peloton, I'm a huge fan of the Peloton, they'll tell you no matter who you are, your fitness level is not on an upward slope all the time. You keep testing, but things go up and down. You keep working through it, but overall, it starts moving up.
We can't go at ten all the time, but I think there are certain times of year when you have to increase your activities, your energy, the hard work, put up a little bit of elbow grease. As we recorded this on October 11, 2023, we're starting Q4. For those of us in technology, this is a busy time of the year, the next 45 business days and a disproportionate amount of business gets closed in these next 45 business days. It's a good time now to put in some elbow grease.
There are different phases. When my wife and I started our first business, we had very low expenses. We had no kids. Our first office was our living room. It’s very easy to throw ourselves into work saying, “We're going to put in this hard work now for planning for our long-term future.” The thing is, with Q4 for every seller, which is obviously top of mind and relevant, hopefully, you're not now shifting gears of putting that work in because the work you do in this quarter doesn't always pay off in this quarter. Hopefully, you've been preparing in Q3 to close out Q4 strong.
Transferring Learnings To Startups
If you happen to be one of those folks who's looking a little light in Q4, this is a time where you go hard with the hope again for Q1, Q2 2024, give yourself reasonable goals and expectations, but Q1 and Q2 give position yourself for great things in Q1 and Q2. Collin, 800 podcasts talking to sales thought leaders, first of all, flabbergasting. Second of all, what a joy to meet many sales thought leaders. You've been involved in many businesses. I'm interested to know how you have taken all of the learning from those conversations and how that breaks down for you when you walk into that next startup. I know you're a powering strength at taking companies from $1 million to $10 million in revenue.
When you come in and do an assessment of where a company is at $1 million. How have you taken all that learning and built it into this methodology? I bet you have a repeatable methodology you apply the next time you're looking at that startup or you're looking at investing in it. What filters do you use to look at a business like that? If you were going in and taking over the sales organization, what's your approach, methodology or playbook?
It's a tricky question because there is no simple answer. Every organization is different to some extent. There are some basic principles of a sound go-to-market strategy. I think where a lot of people get stuck is thinking about what worked in the last startup that's going to work in the next startup, and that's not always the case. That could be as simple as what your sales team looks like.
Do you break out the SDR function and have AEs? Do you not have an SDR function and have full-cycle AEs? Do you outsource the SDR function? Do you do it in-house? These are all critical things to building a sound foundation for your sales team and then even getting more into the lower ACV. Is there more of an emphasis on marketing versus sales where are you going to put the budget and allocate?
Are you bootstrapped? Have you raised money? These are all things that you have to look at in order to decide what the best possible strategy is. At the core, a lot of it comes down to, “How do we get to product-market fit? How do we get to product messaging fit?”Those are the essential things. If you can figure those out, then everything else tends to work itself out for the most part to a certain extent. The more you grow, then the more you have different challenges and problems. The other thing that I think a lot of people make mistakes early on is, 1) Hiring sales leadership too soon and 2) Investing in an expensive tech too quickly. There's a common misconception that a lot of people want all the fancy tools, all the shiny bells and whistles.
Ultimately, below $1 million in revenue, even up to a few million in revenue, you don't need a lot of that stuff. As long as you have a good CRM, good data and good dialing technology, those are the essentials. Investing in all this conversational intelligence, sales enablement, coaching tools, cold email tools and you name it. A lot of those things can wait because technology isn't going to fix a lot of your core foundational problems. A lot of that stuff needs to be worked out. Technology can enable you to accelerate or be more efficient, but a lot of times, it can be a distraction if you haven't figured out some of the core basics.
Technology isn't going to fix a lot of your core foundational problems. A lot of that stuff needs to be worked out. Technology can enable you to accelerate or be more efficient, but a lot of times it can be a distraction if you haven't figured out some of the core basics.
You mentioned, “Think about when you bring in sales leadership.” A big challenge for a lot of founders is they want to absolve themselves of the responsibility of sales because they don't have that core competency. They're great people who started an application development, got good, built a product, or even in the manufacturing business, and it's an engineer who was in some other manufacturing business, but rarely is a founder, somebody who grew up with a professional sales background.
To many, it still seems a little bit like this dark art, then they go back to the concepts from many years ago, which was, “Hire somebody who's mature and experienced, and so on and so forth. They're going to be a rainmaker.” That rarely happens because the rainmaker was a rainmaker at SAP or Oracle and then they come down to the $1 million startup and they go, “Where's my marketing? Where are my sell sheets? You're not knocking on my door to go to our annual conference in Orlando?” It’s a very good council there.
Another thing to add to that, let's assume you're maybe raised, had a good round of funding. Lots of times, people hire too quickly. They're like, “We've got money. We got to spend it.” They get into this cycle of playing the numbers game at the expense of people. This is very common in sales. People, at their core, believe sales is a numbers game, which is numbers are important. You and I get that, and I don't even know if you agree or disagree with this, but sales is not just a numbers game. What happens when you're playing it is a numbers game? You're throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what will stick. What that looks like is more emails, more phone calls and very little strategy, if any.
They take it all the way to the extreme of people, “Let's hire more people. Let's keep hiring more people and then eventually, we will hit the revenue goals at all costs.” That's another mistake that a lot of people tend to make. I know that you were recently on Andy's podcast. I love the new podcast. I've been a little bit obsessed with WIN since he's gone down that train. It's a very important initiative that he's focused on because it's laughable that tech and SaaS companies think winning 20% of the time is good or even great.
You think of the days when you and your wife were running your business on your couch. The truth is, and certainly in the early days of in the funnel, your win rate was probably 60% or 70%. You couldn't afford to invest a ton of time in working lots of deals. Your ability to qualify and move on was tight because you didn't have the bandwidth to waste time with deals that weren't real. There was this, “You're a mature salesperson. You know what you're doing.” There's a qualification that takes place. I think you're right. We might be leaving this era and I'm interested in your opinion where, again, let's go back in time a few years ago.
There'd been seven years of VC money going into tech companies just exploding sales organizations, and then the world became polluted with garbage emails. A whole group of people is turning LinkedIn into the world's biggest spam engine and all these kinds of things. At the core of these poor folks, they were hoping technology could absolve them of the need to be able to have an engaging conversation, showcasing business acumen, industry acumen and sales acumen. They didn't have it. As soon as we have that first live conversation, all I'm going to do as quickly as I can try is punch you into a demo where we're going to talk to you during a demo as well. This is where these conversion rates become minuscule.
It’s a very accurate description of the problem or the monster that's been created. Sometimes, I can be a little bit jaded because I'm in B2B Tech and SaaS. If you look outside of that then things are a little bit different. The thing is that if you look at what the core of the problem is, it's reps putting stuff in their pipe that never should be there in the first place. They've got managers breathing down their neck about their activity and pipeline creation quota, then you get everybody thinking, “We need more leads, so we need more people. We need to spend more money,” or whatever the case is. When really, they probably have more than enough leads. They're just not focusing on the right ones or disqualifying enough of the leads.
For example, at Leadium, we're a service business but we disqualify it on average 62% of our deals that we engage with on our first call never get to opportunity. The ones that get to stage 2 opportunity, we close 87% of the time. We are very selective and fortunate that we can pick and choose who we want to work with based on criteria that we know what's important and things that we look for that make a great customer for us.
Sales Team Management
First of all, those two numbers are staggering. I hope they came out in Andy's podcast. I bet they did because they're so important. Let me ask you this because it's such a great thing to bring up. How do you coach your team so that they're on that first call and they disqualify 62% of the folks on the other end of the call? What are they doing or how are they mirroring against an ideal client profile? How do you help them with that disqualification? How do you coach them to be good at disqualifying somebody?
There are two parts to it. One part you might hate and a lot of your readers are going to hate. The other part I think people will understand. When we go on our first call, which is a 30-minute call, 25 minutes of that call is us asking lots of questions, and then we say five minutes to pitch if we feel that it's a good fit. In that, we are uncovering, “Is this a company worth partnering with? Is this somebody we would want to work with? Do they have something unique about the problem they solve or the niche they work in?”
There are all of these things that we look for that we know make a successful customer. If it's a successful customer, we've been doing this for a long time. We've helped companies raise over $7 billion in funding. We've had 80 companies be acquired and we've had 6 companies IPO as a result of the work we've done for them. We know very well if we want to work with them, we can do good work. That's part one, which I think a lot of people will understand. The second part, a lot of people are absolutely going to hate and probably may not work for your business and that's fine. We don't have quotas.
There's something to unpack. Your team must have reasonable levels of business and industry acumen to be able to get people to respond to 20 or 25 minutes of questions before they get frustrated. You have to earn the right, as you know, for every one of those questions. They must be great questions that get people engaged. I love this thought about the no quota. Tell me about why you have no quota and what you think that does in terms of helping the organization grow faster.
In full context, this does not work for every business. It may or may not work for your business. A large organization, you might be like, “This guy's a whack job.” We understand our business extremely well as far as, “Pay people well, they do a good job,” and what it looks like from a profitability standpoint. That's because we are bootstrap. We understand from a profitability standpoint what the expectation is of what a rep should be closing in order for it to be profitable for the business as a whole, which is important for every business.
It's a loose like, “We expect you to do this between this.” Surprisingly enough, they always hit within that range cons consistently. Consistently, we hit within that range of the loose expectation. It's not this, “Just close whatever. If you don't close anything, that's fine too.” It's not that. There's an expectation of like, “Based on your role, segment, market or whatever, this is what we expect,” and that's what it is. There's this number constantly changing and all of that.
For some people, that's a little scary. I get it. It probably wouldn't work for your business, but for us, it works great. Some organizations are moving in more of a direction like, “Maybe we don't have this crazy pipe quota. Maybe we don't have this crazy activity quota that we're constantly demanding.” You see some things changing in that direction, but there's even this whole thought of something that I used to be totally against. Kevin Dorsey opened my eyes to it as like, “Not every salesperson is money motivated either.” Every comp plan out there is mostly built for money-motivated people, which is only a small percentage of your sales of your sellers or those people that are money-motivated. Most people are motivated by many other things. Most people want low stress. They want to do good work. They want to be around, work with good people, and be compensated well. That is the majority of people.
In his book, Seth Godin said he surveyed 10,000 people and said, “Tell us about the attributes of the best job you've ever had.” The five top ones that came back, none of them had anything to do with money. It was about, “I did my best work. We were doing meaningful work. I was well respected. I didn't mean it was easy. I loved that job because I accomplished something significant. It had nothing to do with the largest paycheck I've ever had.” I should have done this earlier, but for our readers, because you said it's not right for everybody's business. Tell us exactly what the business of Leadium is.
We're a service business. We work in the B2B space, mostly service businesses or a lot with tech and SaaS. We help them with their top-of-funnel challenges through services. That could be done for you go-to-market outbound. That could be inbound lead management or a combination. We have US-based sales development reps in our Virginia and Las Vegas offices. We are their SDR function.
Outsource the SDR function. The name of the book is The Song of Significance, meaning, “People want to feel significant.” I'll throw out one other thought. Management consultants, lawyers or professional services firms, generally have goals, but they don't have quotas. They're not managing the quarter on a quarterly basis, but those people, of course, have to bring in new business. There's a world where I think all those people, most of those people very clearly feel the need to help grow the business. They're focused on business development but not tracking monthly quotas of activities and so forth. Coincidentally, we had Dan Pink on the show, the author of my favorite sales book almost ever called The Sell Is Human and eight other New York Times bestsellers.
He loves sales. At the end of it, I said, “What do you see happening?” In his final comment, he said, “ A low-end, tactical sales are going to go the way of the dinosaur with technology. Sales today is management consulting,” which is why I made that analogy to those professional services firms. He talked about how salespeople must be intellectual, curious, problem solvers, super sharp, smart, engaging and exceptional at discovery. He said that's management consulting. Those worlds don't have quotas. What an interesting idea. There's our clickbait for this epispode, no quotas. How big is your sales team?
We have in total, including SDRCD work for clients, which I help with that team, about 35 people.
Hiring Practices
We got everybody out there reading, lots of CEOs of SMBs you guys are fundamentally an outsourced top-of-funnel generation firm with a big team. I bet everybody would love your opinion on what you look for when hiring these people. It sounds like you have some great people as part of that team. If you're hiring somebody in professional sales, SDR, BDR, and account executive. I'm sure there are some differences, but tell us a little bit about what you look for given your experience doing this when you're hiring these people.
There are some basics, but hiring is tough for everybody. Everybody struggles with hiring, has ever been in a leadership position, has never felt like they've fully figured it out because as soon as you figure it out, there's that one that you took a chance on and you're like, “Why did I do that?” I hate to say that.
It's the truth. I had the same conversation with Frank Cespedes from Harvard, who you probably know. He is probably been on your show three times. I said, “I did the math. I think I've interviewed maybe 1,200 people. I probably hired a couple of hundred people in my career. I thought I was pretty good at this. If I'm honest, I got a 65%.”
Sixty-five percent is great.
He came back and he said, “I've been doing this for 35 years. I've been running Harvard's sales program. This assessment is at best. It's a flip of a coin.” He said in the ‘90s, he started pontificating to people, saying, “It's such a flip of the coin that if you see somebody on paper, there's almost no point to interview them because it's only going to be a 50/50 chance anyway. Don't bother interviewing.” He said he started talking about that and preaching that for a few years until the world wouldn't accept it. He went back. I appreciate your honesty. We get a lot of people saying, “I'm an expert at this and all of this stuff.” I'm with you. This is hard.
There are a couple of things that I do that may be a little bit different. 1) I don't look at their resume at first at all. LinkedIn is the go-to, and frankly, if you're a salesperson and you haven't figured out LinkedIn, then sorry, you're going to get passed over. That's the hard truth that maybe nobody's going to tell you. If you're in sales and when you don't have a job, your job is selling you, optimize your profile. I don't know if you've had Kevin KG on your show. He's got a lot of good insights around hiring.
The hard truth is this: if you're in sales and you don't have a job, your job is selling you. So, optimize your profile.
I'll have to go and get him after this, though.
He scaled ZipRecruiter before it went public. Lots of hiring and they were a platform that helped people hire. He has a lot of good insights about this, then my good friend Nigel Green has a whole course for hiring that's not your guru bogus course, but legit tactical great information for sales managers. The first thing is I'm a big fan of personality tests. Having them pick personality tests. I’m a big fan of that. That’s the Step 1. Step 2 is after the initial call.
The first call is very not what they expect. Typically, candidates come on a first call expecting, “We're going to talk about my job experience and go through my resume. You're going to try to poke some holes in it and ask some questions and all that good stuff like every other hiring manager does.” The first call is more rapid-fire questions, 15 or 20 minutes tops. I'm asking them a bunch of questions. Some that have to do with professionals, some that don't because I'm hiring for the person, not the role, not the skills. None of that. That stuff's important, but it's way less important. What's more important is the type of person you're hiring.
You're looking for certain things about the person as a person, not necessarily as a seller. In that call, you can ask them certain questions like, “What's the most difficult thing you've had to overcome professionally? What was it? How'd you work through it? What'd you learn from it?” Personally, same question. There are a couple of things you're looking for. 1) How they handle themselves under pressure, getting questions like that. 2) One big thing that I'm looking for is, “Are they giving me honest answers or are they feeding me what I want to hear?
Sales Transformation: The role and the skills are important, but they’re way less important. What's more important is the type of person you're hiring. You're looking for certain things about the person as a person not necessarily as a seller.
Authenticity.
The easy way to point that out is if they're being vulnerable, honest, and maybe telling you things that you probably wouldn't want to hear. I love that. If they're like, “I don't know.” They're looking off. Reading their body language is very important. Those are some things that you look for. You're looking for things around work ethic, if they're hungry and humble, “Tell me a time when your manager gave you some feedback that you didn't agree with. How'd you deal with it?” Things like that, then some wild things like, “If you had a boat, what would you name it? Why?” You want to see if they're creative and things like that. I’m looking to see if they're confident.
Those are the things I'm looking for. I'm hiring for the person. I care less about their job experience at this point because this is way more important. They get past that. The next step is a written assessment and personality test and if they get past all that, then it's a more deep-dive interview around job experience, poking holes. Go get a reference. Don't take the reference they give you. Go to the one they didn't give you. If they have five jobs, they give you their most recent job and two jobs ago, I want to know what happened in the middle. I get it. Sometimes, people get put in bad situations and they don't perform, but everybody should at least leave on good terms, which is important.
Readers, these are great stuff here that we can apply for in our business. I love the end of the day, you came up with the attributes you look for, humble, hungry and smart. We like those. There are different ways of calling those things, but we like those, too. Those go back to Pat Lencioni and he is a fantastic guy, but all of the stuff that he came up with, The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team and everything else, humble, hungry, smart. We love passion and optimism. In this day and age, if you've had 5 jobs, you've had 1 or 2 bad sales leaders.
I'm with you. I don't think there's a problem if somebody comes back and says, “I'm not going to give you that second person as a leader because I had a bad sales manager. They were new. They weren't trained. We didn't get along that well because of it. I felt a bit frustrated.” They were about them. Not the team, but the one I had is fantastic. Even the way they share that, I think, points a little bit to that authenticity. You don't want the veneer. Hiring the person is spectacular. It's no different than a sports team. They don't just go for the person with the stats and the speed. They meet these people because they want to know what they're like as people.
One thing I would add to that is if we've all had bad sales managers, get it. You do want to look at how they describe that. You described it in a very straightforward, cordial way. If they badmouth and, “He was an a-hole and the worst boss ever,” if they get into that, pass them over. Something else that I would say stands out if they say something more along the lines of, “That last job I had, like I took a chance, it was a startup, first-time sales manager, top producer, I had a lot of issues. Here's what I was responsible for. Here's what I could have done differently. Here's what I wish I had done. Here's what I learned from it,” you got an Ace.
You always want people who take responsibility. We all make mistakes, but if they're more of a, “I'm going to point the finger and it's all the sales manager,” we're all human beings. We've all had bad bosses. We get it. I'm not a big fan of the people who do nothing but complain about it and don't take responsibility for their actions or what they could have done differently, or at least come out on the other end feeling like, “I made a bad call here. Here's what I could have done differently. Here's what I wish I would've known and here's what I'll do differently next time.” The key difference in the type of person of how they would explain that.
It's a huge difference. I love the idea of you saying, “What did you learn from that?” and then being able to share, “I realized something about me. This is what I need to be successful.” The other question I always love is, “What do you need to learn now?” You think about that growth orientation. For us, humility is growth orientation. I might be confident, but I'm humble enough to know I don't know anything. I'm humble enough to know there's lots for me to learn. Let's put it that way. It's one of the reasons I love this show so much. I love talking to people like you because I've been doing this many years and there's the world of what I don't know. 10X is what I know and it's changing all the time. I love that question to somebody to say, “What's the next thing you need to learn? What are you reading right now? Tell me about the favorite sales book you've ever read. Tell me about it.”
That's one of my questions, “What's the last book you read?” If you're like, “Uh,” not anything very recent because you want people who are committed to investing in themselves and constantly learning. I’m not a huge book reader, but I'm an audiobook person. I'm big on podcasts and audiobooks. I don't read many physical books. It's not my jam. If somebody said like, “I don't read books, but I listen to these podcasts, here's the last episode. Here's what I learned. Here's the last audiobook and here's what I learned.” It's good enough for me.
It doesn't matter how you learn. One of the things we find a lot and then an opportunity for people is we say, “Tell us about your favorite sales book.” They'll go,” “The Challenger Sale.” We'll go, “That's fantastic. We love Matt Dixon. He's been on our show three times. The guy is great. The next question is, what'd you get from it? What did you take from that book?” You'll get people going, “I'm not sure. The Challenger Sale in every chapter references the same three things. Teach, tailor and take control.” “Great book. You remember. It's well written, teach, tailor and take control.”
Readers, when you're out there, you're reading these shows and learning, take some time to pull out your phone, dictate and pull out the things you like. Capture them so you can go back to them. Teach, tailor and take control. You could even do it in the car. Be safe. You don't have to be highlighting and taking notes, but you do want to make sure you don't expect yourself to remember something super well on one read because not many of us do that.
The interesting thing is, depending on how they answer that question, it tells you either 1 of 2 things. They didn't read the book, which is not good or they don't retain things very well, also not good. Reading 52 books a year is not something you want to wear as a badge of honor. If you read three books a year and you take a lot from them and put them into practice, that says a lot more about who you are than, “I've read 52 books this year, but I've put nothing into action remember very little.”
If you read three books a year, take a lot from them, and put them into practice, that says a lot more about who you are than someone who has read 52 books this year but has put nothing into action and remembers very little.
Passion For Professional Sales
It's the same analogy as the numbers in sales. We have 100 approach calls this quarter and 3 progress into the next stage. Probably be better if I had 10 approach calls where 3 progress to the next stage. I had 10 approach calls and 4 went to the next stage. It’s not just the number. It's, “What did I get from the effort?” This will be my last question. I know you're busy. Your energy and enthusiasm for talking about this is absolutely contagious all I'm thinking about on this side of the mic is going, “This guy's had 800 conversations with people. Isn't he sick to death of this topic yet?” Tell me why you love professional sales so much because it's clear that you do. Why is it you love this whole discipline so much?
I'll give a little context first and then I'll answer the question. To be fair, it's not 800 conversations. It's 800 episodes. The iteration of the podcast has changed, but I've probably had a lot, 300 conversations, if not more. I've also probably guessed it on close to 200 shows. There are lots of conversations, but with the podcast, we've done a lot of different things over the years. When we did solo episodes, we did long form and chopped them up into five-minute episodes. What we do is we typically drop a 10 to 15-minute episode with a guest on a tactical topic. Nonetheless, I love it for a couple of reasons.
1) We didn't get too much into my past, but to shed a little bit more color there, I grew up dirt poor. I didn't go to college. My dad was never around. We grew up on food stamps. We lived out of motels. I had nothing. When I got my first sales job, it was my only way out. Within 12 months, I was making 6 figures and I never looked back.
I learned some bad habits early on. Your typical sleazy, commissioned breath salesperson, that was me. I had to unlearn a lot of those things. I didn't have a lot of mentors. I was not the type of person at that stage of my life who was willing to invest in coaching or something like that. The only way that I could learn was by following people on social media, reading blogs, listening to podcasts, and reading books. That's how I learned. I had a lot of mentors from afar.
Now, I have a life that I couldn't even have dreamed of. I live in a beautiful place and have things and four kids and a beautiful wife and you name it. That's all because of sales. The podcast has always been my way of giving back to the sales community for someone like me who comes from nothing and has somewhere they can count on that's reliable. We drop almost daily content on the podcast, on LinkedIn and weekly newsletter, all for free. It's my way of giving back to the sales community for the person like me who doesn't have resources, money, didn't go to school and could have a life beyond their wildest dreams.
First of all, I am sorry for the hardship you encountered and amazed at the success that you've earned for yourself, your wife and your team. It's amazing on this show, when we talk to all of these incredibly successful people, the amount of challenge they have gone through to get to where they are. It's never this linear path and this slope of acceleration. It's always ups and downs and challenges then they showcase resilience. It is such a pleasure having you on our show. Thank you for joining today. It was great to connect with you. Could you remind our readers how they get to leverage you as a mentor like you leveraged others? What resources are out there for them to engage you?
I can give you links, but to keep it super simple. It takes a lot of hard work to put on a good quality show like this. The first thing that you can do is give the show a rating and write it a review. It's the best way you can show your gratitude to Mark. Share the show with your friends, then if you love podcasts like I do, you can check out Sales Transformation on any and every podcast platform. We drop almost daily content there. From there you can pretty much find everything else, whether it's LinkedIn, website, or newsletter. It's all there.
Thank you so much for the gracious comments. I'm going to encourage everybody to go to the Sales Transformation Podcast immediately. That was ranked as one of the top 1% of podcasts in the world. We want to go and check that out. I want a special thanks to Collin Mitchell. What a wonderful guest. It is so great to spend this time with you. Readers, thank you for joining.
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As Collin mentioned, we run this show to improve the professionalism and performance of B2B sales. In doing so, we think we're helping improve the lives of professional salespeople. We want to hear from you. If you think there's another way that we can run this to add even more value to you, please let me know and we love constructive criticism. My personal email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We respond to every single person who gives us feedback and we're very appreciative of it. Thanks, everybody. Great selling and we'll see you next time.
Important Links
Dan Pink - Past Episode
Frank Cespedes - Past Episode
Matt Dixon - Past Episode
About Collin Mitchell
Collin has over fifteen years of sales experience and is passionate about driving revenue growth for sales teams with top of funnel services. He is currently a Managing Partner at Leadium, having previously been VP of Sales, where he helps B2B SaaS companies generate qualified leads and appointments. He also hosts the Sales Transformation Podcast that delivers daily insights and tips on how to sell better and faster. Additionally, he is an investor and advisor to several organizations, drawing on his three successful exits as a founder and co-founder.