Mark Cox sits down with Matt Heinz to dive into the concept of developing a strong sales mindset. Mark, the founder of In The Funnel Sales Coaching, discusses his insights on how shifting the way you think about sales can transform your approach and results. From overcoming call reluctance to offering true value in every interaction, this episode will challenge and inspire sales professionals at all levels. Whether you're a seasoned salesperson or just starting, tune in to discover how a positive sales mindset can make all the difference.
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Developing A Strong Sales Mindset With Matt Heinz
Welcome To Sales Pipeline Radio
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A lot of us noticed his natural tension in most organizations between sales and marketing. Sales are saying, “I don't get enough leads,” and marketing is going, “You would know what to do with the lead if it bit you on the nose.” There's always been a little bit of this competitive tension and I'm starting to wonder if maybe we helped build or emphasize that competitive tension because up to this point we have done about 100 episodes and we have never had a core marketing expert on the show. That all changes now.
We have got Matt Heinz from Heinz Marketing. Matt has deep expertise in the marketing field but all very strong on the sales front. He runs the Sales Pipeline Radio podcast. We have been on that podcast, but we have this great conversation with Matt talking about that interplay between sales and marketing and that relationship and collaboration that's so critical for success.
Matt is one of those common-sense experts in my view just understanding coming to the table and understanding that it's one organization. Regardless of whether it's a sales or a marketing KPI, the most important KPIs are business KPIs. Everybody is part of the team to make sure those things move in the right direction.
Matt has been doing this for a long time with a wonderful career at Microsoft before starting on his own. He's helped dozens of organizations and written multiple books on these topics, a real thought leader in this space. I learned a lot from this discussion with Matt. I think you are going to as well and enjoy it as well. If you do, please like and subscribe to the show because that's exactly how we get great guests like Matt when we have lots of folks who like, subscribe, and download. Tell your friends. If you ever hear anything in one of these episodes that you think we can improve on, let me know. We love constructive criticism and I respond to every idea that we get from you to improve the show. Here's Matt Heinz.
My name is Matt Heinz. I am your host. I’m very excited to have you here. We have a great guest and a great topic now. I think you are going to enjoy it but first just want to thank everyone for joining if you are in the middle of your work day and work week. Thank you for joining us on LinkedIn. If you want to be part of the show you can make a comment. You can ask a question. A rebuttal or rant. You can troll us. You can do whatever you want.
If we see that we can reference it. We can bring it up. If it's a question to comment we can recognize you on the show as well, so thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for downloading and subscribing to every episode of the Sales Pipeline Radio is always available past, present, and future at SalesPipelineRadio.com. I’m very excited to have our guest. He is the Founder of In The Funnel Sales Coaching and the author of the new book Learn to Love Selling Mark Cox. Mark, thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me. I was excited.
I was as well. I don't know if we intended to do a home exchange. I was super excited to have you join here and I have known you for a long time. I followed you and your content. When I saw your new book coming out, I knew we had to get you on the show. For those that don't know yet, maybe do a little bit of an intro of you and where and how you focus.
I am the President and Founder of a company called In The Funnel Sales Coaching. We help sales leaders, salespeople, BDRs and SDRs dramatically improve performance through sales training that impacts behavior. Prior to that, I spent most of my career running large sales organizations and outsourcing our technology companies. Two other passions in life in addition to family. I'm a music fanatic. I love all types of music and I'm still a terrible drummer after all these years and I'm also a hockey fanatic. For many years, I have been loving the Toronto Maple Leafs which will prove to your audience that I obviously can't be that bright.
You are persistent and resilient if nothing else. I'm in Seattle for year three of the Kraken and it's been fun to watch Seattle become lean in with the team. The Kraken did a great job in the community as well. If we have time we might get into a little bit of hockey because I am on the learning curve. I love to watch but if it's much more technical than people realize.
Let's talk first about this new book Learn to Love Selling. You can get it at InTheFunnel.com. You can find it on Amazon. You have been doing this for quite a while. You have had your consulting firm for several years. You have been doing sales and business for a while. Why this topic? What about this topic and this angle was important to you?
The topic and then the title. The content of the book is this comprehensive playbook of thinking about everything you need to do to convert your core business capability into revenue. The model works at the leader level, CEO level, and salesperson level managing their territories. The reason I call it Learn to Love Selling. There are a lot of people in the profession having a pretty tough time and that tough time comes from two things.
First of all, the core understanding of what sales truly is. There are a lot of folks out there who still believe it's the 40-year-old stereotype pitching, cajoling, doing demos, and that type of stuff. That's all gone. What selling is just helping somebody achieve a meaningful business outcome in a way that's beneficial to them and you? It's about helping, not pitching. These two things that I think dramatically improve somebody's Joy of doing this job, and I need to know what to do. First, in my mindset, I need to understand, “What am I doing here? Why am I adding value to the universe?” I'm helping people. I'm making deposits in the universe. I'm not asking for withdrawals.
If you were selling in a way where you are interrupting someone's time asking them to make it 100% ask not having anything to give in response. No wonder people have called reluctance. No wonder people don't want to get on the phone. There are a lot of reasons for it but in part, I don’t think people feel good about what they are delivering and what they are doing. Conversely, if you can figure out what is the value you provide to someone. Not just getting them to sign the deal and to buy something from you, but what do you have a value for them where this interruption becomes irresistible so to speak?
The first one is this spiral of doom. If you think you are just pitching and cajoling, you don't like what you do. The second thing you have to do in order to do that is that people put up a veneer. Salespeople put up a veneer and put on a sales face. I can't be my true authentic self. They like what they do even less and it's draining and exhausting. Rather than looking at it saying, “How do I prepare myself,” so that when I am reaching out I have real insight, value, knowledge, and best practice that I can give to someone. If that's my intent for every call in every discussion, don't worry about the outcome. I'm not just trying to create a qualified sales opportunity. If I start by trying to add value and help, the outcomes will come our way.
If you’re just pitching, it’s no wonder you don’t like what you do. Shift your mindset and focus on adding value.
Why Do People Struggle With Prospecting?
When you get a lead that says, “I want to learn more about you.” That's a pretty easy phone call. When I am prospecting, that is a lot harder. What are some approaches that you found work well? You cover some of this in the book and your training and workshops. What are some approaches that can help people feel better about prospecting, and feel good about the value of providing? Can you learn to love prospecting, Mark?
That's our third book. The second one is Learn to Love Leading for sales leaders and then Learn to Love Prospecting. First of all, again, let's start with this mindset. If people go into their job and what they do every day and they just think this is It's a Grind you are never going to enjoy it. You have got to have a bit of a big picture. For those doing prospecting, you should realize you are doing the most important part of the sales cycle. Every company out there wants more new opportunities and you create them.
When you get good at this or if you can figure out strategically how to get good at this, you are going to be of huge value to future companies, which means your value increases. The way I'd like to look at how to do this and let's make it easy for the folks. What would you or I do? Let's say you are a president of a company. We are reaching out to another president of the company to talk.
The two things we do if we reach out, first of all, there's no chance. We are reaching out to anybody by doing research. We would know the person we are reaching out to the company. We have a point of Interest. We have a reason for the call. You and I have okay business acumen and industry acumen, so we are doing that work.
The second thing is we probably have a pretty good answer when the other person on the other end of the phone says, “Who are you guys? What do you do?” We probably thought about our value proposition message. We have those two things. An articulate value proposition and I can explain what's in there. We do research and have that point of interest prior to every call. We are going to have dramatically better outcomes. It helps us break through that wall that everybody feels like if you interrupt somebody in the middle of the day, you have 7 to 15 seconds to break through the wall to get an authentic conversation out of them.
You have 7-15 seconds to break through the wall during a call. Research, prepare, and articulate your value.
Objections To Traditional Sales Methods
I’m talking with Mark Cox. He's the Founder of In The Funnel Sales Coaching and the author of Learn to love Selling. There's your approach to prospecting and then there's the objections to doing it and some of them are email is dead. No one responds to their email. You can't use the phone anymore. People aren't at the office. There are barely any office lines. They are working from home. Are these excuses? Are these truths?
There's a little bit of truth in any comment out there but depending upon who you have got on your show, you are going to have somebody saying, “The phone is dead. You got to do social selling.” Somebody else is going to say, “Social selling is dead. You got to do the telephone.” Somebody else is going to say, “Email is a way to go.”
I believe if I'm trying to build the pipeline, I think the answer is in either or it's an app. I will make a couple of observations people should digest. You and I are old enough to remember a day when one of the biggest expenses we had was our actual cell phone because we would just get so many voicemails on a given day. We would fill our voicemail. That's all gone now. Nobody leaves me a voicemail. It’s so easy to stand out prospecting. If you are intelligent and can leave a decent voicemail.
The second thing is as much as we say 40% or 50% of all the emails going back and forth are spam. It still does work in certain circumstances. I'm a big believer in doing the research and making a personal stop with the generic just pitch. If you show in the email, you know who I am. That might trigger a little more. There are some great social selling strategies out there and you wrote a book on social selling not that long ago that had some very good ones in there. If we want to get the attention and interest of somebody, we have to use every channel available to us, but we have to be good at those channels. It's not a volume or pure automation thing. We have to leverage our intelligence to personalize and humanize the reach out.
It’s not about cold calls or warm calls. It’s about offering value when you reach out. That's what turns prospects into clients.
I'm here to say the second biggest source of pipeline for us has been the telephone. Calling people leaving voicemails. It's following up from there, but it's that campaign that has been successful. Now it's not necessarily cold calling. It's a warm calling. These are people who know me. They are not necessarily current clients or even past clients but people that I know from various whatevers but you will leverage that and you have something of value to share.
I still have call reluctance. It's still hard for me to schedule and protect the time. I need to do my prospecting but I have learned to enjoy it because I believe that I have something valuable to share and contribute when I do that. I want to go back to May of 2013. You have a long successful career in selling and in May of 2013 at least according to LinkedIn, that's when you started In The Funnel Sales Coaching. What's your origin story? A lot of people reading this are people who are very successful in their careers. People think, “It’s interesting if I could take my expertise and do my own thing.” That is a very scary thing. You and I both know that firsthand, but how did that get started and why did you do it?
The Origin Story Of “In The Funnel”
At the time I was on a break. I had been leading large sales organizations in different outsourcing and technology companies and had decided I wanted to pull back a little bit on my travel so I stepped away from something. For being in that role it was probably going to take me a year to find the next large US technology company that wanted to sell into the Canadian marketplace, likely into big Canadian banks and I want to run one of those. While I was engaging in a search campaign a few smaller organizations came to me and they told me, “We are not hiring you. We can't afford or attract someone like you but will you help us?”
Before I knew what was happening, I was working with three of them. Two tech companies and then one financial services business. I was doing this while I was in this search campaign, and I was interviewing with a large US tech company wanting to change its leadership in Canada. They are called PureFacts, and I was working with one of these companies. I told the team. “I have got an interview,” and this was the 5th or 6th interview.
The Canadian operations were two doors down from them here in downtown Toronto. I leave the PureFacts offices and walk two doors down. Go into this interview and there are 5 or 6 people around this table. As I was going through the interviews, I was already starting to think, “When I take over this organization. That person is gone and this person isn't going to make it.” I’m thinking about the whole go-to-market.
I was asking them a lot of questions about what was working and what wasn't working, and then it just hit me right in the middle of this interview. I was in that room for 3 hours, but about 90 minutes in it I would rather go back and help PureFacts than run this thing. I played nice for the rest of the interview. I went downstairs instead of going back to my smaller technology company. They are large now, but then. I made a right instead of a left, went to a coffee shop and then just called my wife Donna. I said, “I don't think I'm going to work for anybody anymore. I think I can build a business out of doing what I'm doing here,” and that was the origin story. It was super fun.
Thank you for sharing that. We were talking about my origin story in the earlier episode. I will leave it at that so people will check out the Selling Well Podcast in a little bit when our episode comes out. I remember being very excited and terrified and assuming that we were off. I'm coming up several years from when I headed out with a laptop and a bus pass. I can name countless reasons why it's 100% been worth it. At some point, we should do a session on just the entrepreneurial journey.
I know a lot of people that I think would be very successful doing it and it is a scary thing if you haven’t jumped off that cliff without a safety net and tried to do it but for those of us that have done it and have at least spoken for myself. I made a lot of mistakes a long way and can help others figure out what that path is with a little higher likelihood of launched velocity. That'd be great. I'm going to wrap up here on your LinkedIn profile underneath your name it says, “Learning never exhausts the mind.” We were talking about this in the past episode. What are some of the places you go to to continue to learn about sales and go-to-market?
Learning Never Exhausts The Mind
One of the places is running my podcast. The Selling Well, we have these smart great guests like you. When we do that, we do the research on the guest. We are trying to read their books and understand their blogs and some of their white papers. We are digesting content to stay current and that's not just for sales but for leadership, coaching, mindset, and all of those kinds of good things.
The second place frankly is we still have our subscription to Harvard Business Review. I still love getting the magazine in the mail and reading through it. It will trigger me to go online and look at other topics that they are speaking about. There's a handful of podcasts including yours Sales Pipeline Radio that we enjoy. We have got those built into our habits. I listen to podcasts while driving in and out of work and I love to do my reading first thing in the morning because I'm drinking coffee and I am so happy when I'm drinking coffee. I'm also pretty happy in the morning.
Same question, different topic. Learning never exhausts the mind. We talked about hockey beginning. I have watched a lot of Kraken hockey over the last couple of years and just continue to learn about this sport that on the surface looks like they are just pedaling around a piece of rubber trying to get into a net but is way more complicated than that and is way more interesting. The strategy and all the tactics and the approaches teams have. Where are some of the places for folks like me who are emerging hockey fans, maybe this is a question. Where are some of your favorite podcasts and other places to read about hockey?
To be honest with you, I don't listen to a lot of podcasts on hockey. I'm a fanatic. I watch a lot of hockey and I still play a lot of hockey. I'm a goalie, so I will still go to training to try and get better even though I think my chance of making the NHL came in when it's all over now. A great friend of mine loves a podcast called Spittin Chiclets. It's the most popular hockey podcast out there. The reason it's called Spittin Chiclets is because in the old days when there was no mask and cage. If you get a puck in the mouth you are spinning your teeth out because they are going to come out and they call them chiclets. “I lost the chiclet on that one.” That's why hockey players look like me.
It’s not the first time I have heard about that podcast. I'm going to have to check it out now, but before people check out Spittin Chiclets, I want them to buy a copy of Learn to love Selling where else can people learn more about you and continue to learn from you and read from you?
The easiest place is LinkedIn. Please check me out and connect with me. It's Mark Andrew Cox on LinkedIn and the company name is In The Funnel. You can go to InThefunnel.com and we love to hear from you on our show and everybody will know about our episode with Matt Heinz. That's The Selling Well podcast wherever you listen to your podcast on Apple or Spotify, that's where you can hear about us.
Check that out and find the book on Amazon. Check out InThefunnel.com for the Selling Well podcasts and more content from Mark Cox. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me, Matt. What a pleasure.
Thank you, everyone, for reading and for being part of this. We will see you in another episode. Until then. Take care. We will see you soon.
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