Ep 16: Principal Consultant & Fractional/Virtual Sale Manager Practice Leader: Brian Panosian

In today's episode of the Best Sellers Podcast, host Doug Deak chats with Brian Panosian, principal consultant, trainer, and fractional sales leadership practice leader at the Sales Coaching Institute. Brian shares insights from his journey, starting from Procter and Gamble to becoming a sales executive at Cisco, and finally to a sales coach. He discusses key elements like the importance of building relationships, establishing trust, and understanding the customer's needs. Brian introduces his sales model 'WYMN' (Who You Met New) and explains its impact on building client relationships. The episode also delves into how fractional sales leadership can benefit businesses, tips for integrating with existing teams, and the importance of alignment between sales and other departments. Brian emphasizes the need for continuous learning, closing deals effectively, and avoiding common sales mistakes. The rapid-fire round at the end gives a quick glimpse into Brian's practical advice for aspiring sales professionals.

01:46 Meet Brian Pian: Sales Leadership Expert
03:05 Brian's Journey from Healthcare to Cisco
05:46 The WYMN Sales Model: Building Relationships
09:24 The Role of Fractional Sales Leadership
16:47 Engaging Your Sales Team in Virtual Meetings
17:14 Essential Tools for Virtual Sales Management
18:06 Transformative Sales Management Examples
19:23 Creating Effective Sales Strategies
20:41 Challenges in Sales Leadership Tenure
24:08 Common Mistakes in Sales Team Management
25:36 Aligning Sales with Other Departments
26:41 Coaching Sales Reps and Teams
27:40 Hiring Fractional Sales Leaders
28:50 Future Trends in Sales Leadership
31:26 Rapid Fire Questions with Brian
32:33 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

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But I think the best ones are those that are one in a hyper growth mode, because when you're in a growth mode, it's hard to hire the right people. It's hard to establish a sales problem. You're just going as fast as you can. When you're doing that kind of growth, you're taking out competitors. You gotta get smarter about your competitors. They're gonna get smarter about you because now you're on the radar. How do you prepare for that? Then the third thing is really to focus on. The executive relationships. When you do those things, you're viewed differently by the executive team, and eventually you can become a trusted advisor and you have access to things that you might not normally get. If you're just dealing with purchasing agents or materials managers or, or folks like that who are really important to you, you are listening to the Best Sellers podcast presented by Doug Deak, where the focus is elevating your sales game. The best Sellers podcast, your ultimate destination for winning sales strategies. Good Day Bestseller Podcast community where sales excellence takes Center stage. I'm your host, Doug Deak, founder and managing principal of the Sales Coaching Institute. This podcast brings you face to face with the brightest minds shaping the world of sales and sales leadership today. Each episode features live thought provoking conversations. Trailblazers, industry experts and top performing sales professionals who are redefining what it means to succeed in sales. Our guests bring deep experience, expertise that creates the perfect platform for uncovering actionable insights, proven sales strategies, and powerful stories that inspire sales, growth and transformation. If you're ready to learn from the best, sharpen your sales skills and elevate your sales game, you're in the right place. Let's start. My guest today is Brian Pian, principal, consultant, trainer, and fractional sales leadership practice leader with the Sales Coaching Institute. Hi Brian. How are you today? Hi, Doug. Good to be here. Good to, good to see you. Brian is a former Cisco sales executive and he focuses on helping sales organizations with elevating sales performance for executives and sales professionals. Proven fractional sales leadership programs that drive optimized processes and revenue growth. He's also adept at creating persuasive presentations, honing closing techniques, and expediting sales cycles. He also delivers impactful workshops on essential sales skills, like how to create killer questions and how to outsell your competition. Brian is also the genius behind WYMN. Who you met knew a new model to amplify pipelines and drive revenue expansion again, great to see you, Brian. Uh, good to be here. Good to be seen. Good to be heard on your podcast. So, tell us a little bit about your journey and sales and sales leadership and what led you to become a sales trainer consultant with my organization for the last five years and, and really unpack that for our listeners. I think the short version is that if you look the, the first half of my career, it was all in healthcare. I started with Procter and Gamble, which provide great training for a young know nothing college graduate, wanting to be a sales professional. And I'm really grateful for the training I got selling in the operating room, which is a high intense environment to sell in. Not a lot of room for error. Uh, but through that I progressed into technology, uh, worked with McKesson, uh, another great company. 22 years into that career, I get a call, uh, from someone to talk with someone at Cisco Systems. We met for breakfast. I didn't know what Cisco Systems was, what they did. I didn't know what packet it from a port. I really didn't know what networks were and I wasn't making all this up. And I actually told the person to hire me. You don't wanna hire me. I don't know anything. This is not for me. And I'm so grateful to this day. That Ellen Lale hired me because she saw something that I didn't see. I would not have hired me if it was, if the roles were reversed. So I had a great long career at Cisco over 16 years, and boy, what a sales machine that is tremendous training. What a brand to represent really got fluent in the executive space. Complex sales selling very high ticket items. 40, 50, $60 million deals are not unusual. That brought up a lot of training from there. I was able to become a sales leader, become a global sales leader, that provided a lot of other insights into how to work with different cultures around the world, companies that are global, what does it mean to lead a team, as well as lead performance within those clients. So all those things combined have really shaped me well until we got to the point where I had an offer, uh, like a lot of us did, who had enough gray hair and enough experience to say, would you like to leave Cisco? And this was during Covid and. I thought about it a lot. I thought, you know, if I don't do this now to become a sales coach, I might not do this. And that's where I met you and I took the package from Cisco. You and I hit it off on the very first call, and I know you talked to a lot of people. I said, I like Doug. I like his tempo. He's very direct, very brief, very concise, my kind of way to consume content. And it's worked out great. I've taken everything I've learned in those first 35 years. Synthesized it. And now I get to talk to all different kinds of companies, whether it's technology companies, agricultural companies, uh, manufacturing companies, financial companies. It all applies in terms of what I learned. And I share the things that have been great, and I share my mistakes, which are equally as valuable so they don't make 'em. And I've also learned that through this process. I wish I knew this as a parent earlier, but people really don't care about your opinions. But they sure wanna hear about your experiences because the experiences are, are true and they're real. Uh, they're all not perfect. At the end of the day, it helps to grow and accelerate sales for a lot of my clients. Excellent. On your introduction, you are the creator of WYMN, who you met, knew as a sales model and process for our listeners, would you unpack that for us? Sure. Um, one of the first accounts I got for Cisco was a company called Southern Company. They're a very large regional utility. They have Georgia Power, Alabama Power, Mississippi Power had golf power at the time, Southern Company. When I got it. I knew two people in the company. I knew the CIO, Becky Blaylock, and one other person that I knew I'll, I'll bring that up in a minute. And I called Becky and said, Becky, I've taken this job at Cisco and they want to give me Southern Company. Now she's a, you know, an officer of the company, but a close personal friend. And she says, Brian, you know, I love you, but we hate Cisco. We're they call an a b, C shop. I said, well, what is that? I go, we'll buy anything but Cisco. I had this giant quota. I had this excitement and enthusiasm for the job, didn't know anything about the company. I said, I'm gonna take this account down. Well, I quickly learned that in all the appointments that I got. They would say, Brian, it's a really nice guy. We hate your company. I. Mm, you're arrogant. We don't wanna do business with you. And that went on and on and on. I thought, you know what? I'm gonna get fired here in the first six months 'cause I can't sell anything. So I went to the boss and hired me and I said, look, we gotta retool this whole engagement with this customer. We gotta build trust first. We gotta earn the right to sell.'cause we don't have that right now. I don't care if we gave this stuff away for free. They're not interested. Mm-hmm. So I said, here's what we're gonna do. We're not gonna collect purchase orders. We're gonna collect relationships. And so my team was big, had 20 people, engineers, other salespeople, product specialists, and I said, all, every two weeks we're gonna get together. And I don't care who you meet in the account, you're gonna come back and report who you met, knew it could be in it. It could be in transmission, distribution generation. It could be the shoeshine guy, it could be the CEO. Anywhere in between. All you gotta do is report back to me who you met, knew. Magic started to happen because Word got out that, hey, Cisco's investing in the account. They're trying to build relationships and rapport. And then we got referred to somebody else, go talk to this guy. And what happens went from two relationships to well over 400. And guess what happens when you have more visibility, you have more knowledge, your pipeline begins to grow because you now understand projects, big projects, things that are, you know, operational based budgets, not just it. And as that happened, we got. We earned the right to walk the floors. We got their trust. They shared information with us. So our biggest sales tool wasn't our products. It wasn't our shiny mount blanc pen. It wasn't our shiny shoes, it was our two ears.'cause all we did was listen and ask some questions. And so that's what happened. We go from two relationships to 400. The other relationship that I had in the account other than Becky, the CIO, I thought was my ace in the hole. And that's my wife. I said, I'm gonna go. I am Lee Ian's husband. She's been here 30 years. You gotta buy from me. Well, didn't help me at all. They'd say, yeah, we like your wife a lot, but we don't like your company. So it took time and it took two and a half years to get our first order. However, once that first order hit, it was close to $53 million. After that. We've grown the business year over year, over year, over year, over year, double digit growth, and it's been a, a great success story. And I haven't called on the account in years, but now the account manager is the person I hired to take my job when I was there, and he's done a great job with it. So it was who you met new, and it's what I use in my practice, my workshops, my talks to salespeople. It sounds very easy to understand. It's very difficult to execute, but it's very measurable and very effective. I love that we're not here to collect pos. We're here to establish trust and rapport and meet new people who you met knew. Great. Great story, Brian. Thank you, Brian. As the practice leader of the fractional sales leadership, as well as virtual sales manager practice at the Sales Co coaching Institute, how would you define fractional sales leadership and why do you think it's becoming more popular in the marketplace today? I think there's three things that are different about a fractional lead that companies are taking advantage of. The first thing is experience. Someone like you, someone like me that comes in, we've got the scar tissue. We've seen this before. We understand a sales process. That's one big thing. We can walk right in. There's no training necessary. The second thing is that we're truly not a large burden. To that organization because we're usually 10 99, you know, engagements. You don't have to pay my insurance if you fire me, you don't have to pay my unemployment. It's usually for a defined period of time, and it's specific in terms of why someone like you and I are here. We're here to help either build a sales process, build more bench, help improve close rates with the accounts. And then the third thing is that you kind of take advantage of being that fresh set of eyes, that fresh voice, that fresh enthusiasm, and that can inspire a sales team. And it lets them know, Hey, this company's investing a lot with us. To bring somebody in with all this experience, conversely, the CEO and and me or you have a great rapport because there's no filter. Mm-hmm. I can go to the CEO and say, Hey, you're really not doing this the right way, or This works, this works well. This is the best practice you should consider. They're very open to that. It's not this relationship where I'm an employee and you're the big boss and I gotta be careful what I say. No, you know it for me, it's wide open. I'll say, look, this is where you're doing well. Is it three years? You can improve in this is what I recommend. And there's usually a, a large of quick cadence between us where things start to happen fast and then the salespeople see that in action and they respond accordingly. Excellent. Brian, what types of businesses benefit most from fractional sales leadership? I. Well, if I would say all of them, that might be a little bit of an overstatement, but I think the best ones are those that are one in a high hypergrowth mode. Because when you're in a growth mode, it's hard to hire the right people. It's hard to establish a sales process. You're just going as fast as you can and a lot of things get left behind. And then you reach that upper plateau and you're like, oh my gosh, how do we get here? And what do we do? So it's that building that logical sales process. And that could be a small company that's in that hyper growth mode. Could be a mid-size company, you know, let's call it up to a billion dollars in sales. Where they're starting to really get market share. The other thing that's a big plus is that when you're doing that kind of growth, you're taking out competitors. You gotta get smarter about your competitors. They're gonna get smarter about you because now you're on the radar. How do you prepare for that? And then the third thing is really to focus on the executive relationships. A lot of salespeople, me included when I was younger, was nervous about. Calling on the executives. I mean, I could feel the sweat running down my back when I had to meet with anybody that has C before their title. But when you get comfortable there and you get knowledgeable, you can actually add to the relationship and the dynamic and challenge those executives. And how do you do that? Well, you have the right questions. You get them to think about things they hadn't thought about before. And it's all, it's not all about, Hey, here's something I gotta solve today. You know? And not that question. What keeps you up at night? When you do those things, you're viewed differently by the executive team, and eventually you can become a trusted advisor and you have access to things that you might not normally get if you're just dealing with purchasing agents or materials managers or folks like that who are really important to you. But if you really want to have that wide and deep relationship and immersed in a client's business, that's what you gotta do. You gotta be able to be fluent at the executive level, fluent at the operational level, and then fluent at any level below that. Excellent. Brian, how does a new fractional sales leader integrate with an existing sales team? Well, the first thing you gotta do is build trust and really state your purpose as to why you're here. You're not there to take anybody's job. You're not there to, you know, do anything that maybe a brand new employee would be looked at. You say, look, I'm hired to do these three things, and if I do these things well, you'll trust me. We'll have success together, and when I leave, I'm gonna hand you the keys to the car. You can know how to drive this sales team and you don't need me anymore. I'll become obsolete in six to eight or 10 or 12 months.'cause now you know how to do it and that's when it works the best. Excellent. Brian, what are some common challenges you encounter when stepping into a new fractional sales leadership role and how do you overcome them? I think one of the first things is you gotta get up to speed on the product.'cause a lot of times you don't have the benefit of the new hire training or, or maybe going away for two weeks into a think tank about the product, especially if there's a lot of products. The second thing is, you know, knowing that competition, you've got to be able to know that your competition studying you as much as you gotta study them. It's like that war room that you put together. And so if you haven't been in the industry for a long time. You, you gotta work twice as hard to have those conversations. So those two things. And then the third thing is that if you're gonna put together a sales process, you've gotta be able to stand up and say, I'll go out in the field with you and put this to work with you. I'm just not gonna sit here and flip up PowerPoints and say, this is how you do it. No. I'll go out in the field with you, let's go make some sales calls, and then you, that's where you earn the real trust, where you add value to those sales calls and you bring things to light that maybe they hadn't thought of before. And if you do those three things, they are a challenge. But if you do 'em well, man, it can be a really enthusiastic and powerful relationship. Brian, how do you measure success as a fractional sales leader? Easy. There's only one way to measure my success, and that's through my customer success. And that's it. And that's, that to me is the ultimate measure. Define customer success. Is that a sales revenue number? What does customer success mean? Customer success to me is when I ask a customer, what does it look like to you? And I align with that and I help them achieve it. And, and here's, here's, here's a really. Good question. You asked me a lot of times when I had trust with the executives. Imagine asking this question to the executive, tell me about your comp plan this year. Imagine a salesperson saying, what is, I don't need to know the numbers, but how? What is it? Is it salary, bonus, employee retention, OPEX. Shareholder value. What is it that drives that bonus for you? And he's gonna look at you and say, well, what do you mean? Because I think if I can help you with one of those things, what's one of those things? If I can drive opex by a point, who else is gonna have that conver conversation as a client executive and, and just to bring that home. If you were my client executive Doug, and you came to me and I'm your. Customer, and it's January 1st. And I said, Doug, what's your quota for the year? And you say, well Brian, it's $5 million. And if I said to you, how do we get you to 8 million? How's that gonna feel? You're like, what? Same thing. It's that customer success that's always in the forefront of what we do. And if we keep the customer success in the forefront, then you make the commissions, then you make the bonuses, then you make chairman's club, then you get the plaques, you get all those other things that fallen behind all that stuff. But if you ignore customer success, nothing else is gonna happen. Excellent. When we talk about virtual sales manager, how does virtual sales management consulting differ from a traditional sales trainer or sales coach? Well, today it's probably not as big of a challenge as it was before Covid, because now virtual is an accepted model. It's kind of hybrid. I don't like it as much as the old school model 'cause I like to be in a room with folks. I like to be in person with 'em. I like to feel that energy. Mm-hmm. Um, I like to feel that presence when we're all together. I like going out to lunch after a sales meeting that you can't do anymore. So I think if you're gonna be in a virtual lead role, you've gotta invite others to your. Whether it's your meetings, whether it's your best practices, whether it's competitive reviews or close plans, whatever it might be, you have to engage everybody. Otherwise you could lose them. I mean, most people don't want to be in a sales video call more than 30 minutes before they're gonna check emails, reply to text, turn the video off, run up and get a cup of coffee, all those things that everybody does. It's understandable. Those are the challenges within a virtual sales leadership role. But if you can do that. You can minimize some of those distractions. Brian. What tools and technologies are essential for effective virtual sales management? Well, everybody thinks you gotta have really cool PowerPoints. I think if you've got a good process that's repeatable by others, that's, that's a great tool. The other tool is you gotta keep it interesting and relevant to your sales team. I think some of the best things, and I'll go back to how we started this, is when other salespeople share experiences. Good or bad, don't care. It all kind of is that patchwork that brings us a little more knowledge or a little bit more comfort. You know, I'd like to hear when a sales guy says, oh, I just got crushed in this call'cause I wasn't prepared with my presentation or my competition, you know, out prepared me. Those things are just as helpless as someone that says, man, here's this messaging that I brought to this executive. Here's the line of questioning. Try it and use it. That's that cross pollination of good and bad. That all adds up to something really good. Excellent. Brian, can you share an example of a transformation you've helped facilitate as a virtual sales manager or a fractional sales leader? I think the one that comes to mind was a client that I had that was kind of in that growth stage. They're about a $40 million company. They had very successful salespeople, but they could never forecast properly. And one of the things I brought from Cisco that is a best practice for Cisco is that I'd ask people, okay, when you come to the meeting on Monday morning, we're gonna have a forecast call. Not just a loose forecast call. It's gonna be, what are the deals you think are. You're gonna commit to closing in the next two weeks, and we're gonna dive into that. Then the next thing is, okay, you've got other deals in your pipeline. We'll call those upside deals. When we do that, you become accountable to that business and you know you're gonna have to stand up in another week or two and talk about those deals in a very informed. Articulate manner. Not one of these things that I feel good about this deal. You know, you can't feel good about a deal. It's like, okay, what are the three things that have to happen to close this business out? Mm-hmm. Do we have the signatures? Is the competition eliminated? Have you been awarded vendor of choice? Is there any other reviews that have to be all those things that have tripped us up in the past? When we address those upfront with a customer, we eliminate those barriers to success and our close rates go up. Excellent. Brian, how do you approach creating a sales strategy for a team that's struggling to meet its revenue objectives? You know, uh. I've led teams that have struggled with hitting their numbers, and I think when we did it, and it probably applies to a lot, is that you've got a, make sure you got the right people on the field at that time. You know, I don't want my quarterback playing defensive end all right? Mm-hmm. It's not gonna work out well. If I've got sales leaders that are real sales leaders, let 'em lead. But the last thing you wanna do is have a sales champion. You just put it in a sales leader, that's not always the best example, and it can impact revenues and growth. The other thing that you gotta make sure of is that everyone understands what's the group objective, meaning we gotta enthusiastically rally for what our responsibilities are to the company. To drive the sales. And if you have to change that and re, and instead of repeating the same things that come up short, we've gotta be open to that. And so as a sales leader, you gotta challenge your team to say, maybe you gotta go out and meet new people. Quit calling the same person over and over and over again just because they're your friend and they love to go to lunch with you. Go out and meet new people. You learn new things. Again, in that situation, any situation, your two biggest assets as a salesperson is this ear lobe on the left and this ear lobe on the right. Put 'em to use. They're big assets and that can change the trajectory of a sales team. There's a lot of news on tenure or lack of tenure for sales leaders according to LinkedIn. Indeed, the average shelf life or tenure of a sales leader is 16 months to 24 months. Why is that? Well, I think if you go back, um, there's very few companies that have the budget. Or their foresight to, to really identify people young and career that really might be best suited for a path in sales leadership there. If you don't do that early, you can't invest in them. You can't give them the training, whether it's gonna be onsite or third party training or mentorship that they need to have or an executive sponsor that they hang out with. And it should be a long process because unfortunately, and I've experienced this, I've had salespeople that have become sales leaders and yeah, you've got the authority. Man, it can be overwhelming to one. Give up your role as a salesperson where you pretty much are calling the shots. Now your success is determined by a team of 5, 6, 10 other people. And then you've got all these other things you've gotta do in you're burden by planning, forecasting, expense account. You gotta manage up, you gotta manage down. Plus you got nine phone calls coming at you every day. That can be troublesome. It can be overwhelming if you're not prepared for it. So I think to answer your question is a lot of companies don't have this long runway of identifying the right people, maybe through disc, maybe through other tools, maybe through experience and say, this is our guy that we're gonna invest in for the long haul. If you don't become that manager, sometimes that's the greatest thing that can happen to you in your career. Say, look, I'm gonna be the sales guy. I'm gonna take care of the customer. I wanna have boots on the ground all the time, and that's what makes me happy. I think identifying that is really important early, and I think our culture, our society, and our business is suffering from terminal impatience work. If you're a publicly traded company, you're managing month by month, quarter by quarter to hit those numbers, but. When there's a, an opening in a sills leadership role at an organization, the cardinal mistake most organizations make is they promote their best salesperson to sales leadership. What in your experience does that mean? I. Well, it, it, it, let me give you another sports analogy'cause I love doing workshops with sports analogies. If Patrick Mahomes today says, you know, I really want to be the offensive coordinator, and the owner says, that's a great idea, Patrick. And next weekend we see him on the sidelines with a clipboard. Really? Is that the best thing for us to do? Mm-hmm. No, not today. And that's. One of the biggest mistakes people make is that great salespeople make great sales leaders. Yeah, you might get a little bump in your base. You might get some stock, but at the end of the day, if you really don't want that role, 'cause your compensation usually is not gonna be as good. If you're really good at sales, you're gonna overcome your boss year after year after year. I've experienced it. I've seen it and I've done it. I will tell you that one of my experiences, I did get a role as a regional vice president. When I got the call that I got the job, I felt terrible. I'm like, oh my God, what have I just done? I've out interviewed my competition. I said all the right things. I got the job. I'm like, oh my gosh, someone else is gonna take my accounts. Now that I've worked so hard to build all the rapport, relationships, and now I'm gonna be out, and that's what happened. I swear if I could go back to that decision, which I can't. I probably wouldn't have made that decision. I probably would've stayed as the client executive versus the regional vice president. Brian, what are the most common mistakes businesses make in managing their sales team and how do you help correct them? Well, they don't invest enough What we do. Invest enough what? Money, time, well, resources, and time. What we do, um, is not about tips, tricks and techniques. What we have, what we build is a craft. And like anything else, you have to invest in that craft. When you do that, people get better. Nobody gets better at whatever they do without help from others. You can't always figure it out on your own. And a lot of companies just overlooked it. They think, oh, here's your business card, here's your brochures. You know, go sell doesn't work that well. If you don't invest early, you're gonna end up spending a lot more money than you need to spend.'cause it's very costly to have high turnover with your sales team to to recruit new people. Bring them in. Then you have all that problem with the clients. They're like, oh, you're like this. Sales guy of the week. Great. Here comes another one. Mm-hmm. See if you can last. So I think upfront you've gotta be really diligent and have a good process working with hr, working with management. Say this is the kind of person that works well with us. This is their profile, this is their background. And depending on what the industry is, it could be. Someone who's more engineering laden. You know, maybe we need some tech technical colleges graduates to come in. Others, it could be the opposite of that. We need people, a lot of agility, people that can move self-starters, things like that. But you gotta find out what the best is and then your batting average of keeping people longer will go much higher. It's just too expensive if you keep missing. Brian, how do you ensure alignment between sales and other departments like marketing? Accounting and operations. I find that you can never over communicate with those departments. You can never over communicate with marketing or whatever it might be, operations, quality, control. You know, you have to treat 'em as a customer. You have to treat 'em and say, Hey, this is what we're doing in the field. These are what the customers are saying. These are some of our challenges, and everybody gets, gets a collective input from sales. The sales guys are the ones on the front lines and they see that, oh, you guys are gonna the ball games, you're going to lunch, you're playing golf. That all sounds like fun. But if you don't do those things to collect information and build the rapport and bring it back, you're gonna kind of silo yourself off from the rest of the organization. But when you come back and say, Hey, marketing, this is the messaging that that's works well, manufacturing, packaging looks great. Customer would love to see if we could have a little more input on the coloring or whatever it might be. Whatever those things are, it really builds that. Complete Team 360 as a salesperson. We all need those folks to be successful because if we alienate 'em and then we call'em for help and they say, uh, not right now, we're in trouble. Brian, what's your philosophy when it comes to coaching individual sales reps, vir, managing a team? Probably the same, you know, a a lot of, um, again, earning the right to coach, building trust and rapport. It's not about me. I'd rather be more interested than interesting to the folks because I have to earn that right every time. So whether it's a team or an individual, and sometimes it's a blend of both things that you're doing, and you've gotta be very present with that team. Because here's the reality. When, when you and I come into a, a company like this, they're really not looking for ways to embrace us. Sometimes they're looking for ways to eliminate us. Oh yeah. He's not like, he's not our kind of guy. No. I gotta come in. Be humble. Patient, be somewhat agile and then earn their trust. And that's the, if you don't have that foundation, there's nothing left after that. But if you do it right and they say, okay, now we can trust you, then you're gonna get deeper in the book and understand more and be able to bring more value. Thank you. Brian, what advice would you give to a C-level executive or business owner considering hiring a fractional sales leader or a virtual sales manager? One is look for that instant value exchange. When you finally find the one that you like, do your homework upfront. Know that you're gonna come in and, and pay them well to come in. But remember, it's, it's just what you're paying. There's no additional burden rate. To have that person come in. The second thing is, before you hire, do a panel interview. See how the other executives work with this person, how they interact with you. Because how they act with you as executives is probably they're gonna, how they're gonna act with your client executives. And so you wanna make sure they're comfortable on their feet, they're able to build rapport quickly and they're actually able, you know, ask questions or learn things and bring some things to the table that aren't there today. So if, if you get those two things right. Then I think you say, okay, this is why we need this guy because it's now a specific reason. And define what that reason is. They're coming in for, is it close rates? Is it sales process? Is it presentation skills? Is it, how do we, you know, recruit and hire more, whatever it might be. Be really defined as to what that is. So in that fractional leader comes in that can execute that plan. Excellent. Brian, what trends do you see shaping the future of sales leadership and sales team management? Wow, that's a big question. I, I, there are multiple trends for sure. I think top, top two, AI tech, sales enablement. What, what do you think? I think because we're coming outta this covid. World. You really have those young professionals that have lived behind a Zoom or a Google Meet or whatever it is now, have to be able to get on their feet, get in their car, go see clients, and have a conversation. You know, I've got, you know, three 30 year olds that are sales professionals. You can't do it over text, you can't fake this. You can't fake communication. So I think, you know, AI is, is always gonna be here with us now, but I think that's one of the biggest barriers. How do I transition my young professionals that I gotta have and I get confident enough that they can go out and have a face-to-face for an hour without looking at their phone. And a lot of them can, can really do it. It's just part of that craft building. Again, I gotta trust you, Doug, that you're gonna be able to be this 25-year-old graduate and stand on your own two feet and represent our company and our people well in front of that executive and grow our business and grow our relationships, and not the opposite of that. So I think that's one of the biggest things, if not the first two biggest things. Challenging cus people right now. Excellent, great advice. Brian, what's one actionable piece of advice you'd give to sales leaders listening to this podcast today? The hardest thing that you and I see is salespeople love to get, I'll use a sports analogy here, get the ball inside their red zone and they can't close the deal. A lot of salespeople just don't have that extra gear to close the sale. If you don't have a close plan, if you don't have a process, closing starts with the first sales call. Closing starts with the first presentation. Closing starts with the first lunch, closing starts with the first round of golf. All those things happen, so when you actually get to the point where they've made a decision, they're about to make a decision. You're gonna win that business. But hope is not a strategy in these things. We know that you can't hope that your friend who you've taken a lunch is gonna make sure you get the po. Mm-hmm. So I think that's the biggest challenge for customers and, and you show me a company that's got a 20% close rate, I'll show you how to get it to 40. If they're at 15, I'll get it to 30. Those are the things that we can do by just doing some of these fundamental things. If you show me a company that's got 80% close rate, you don't need me. You're doing great. Keep doing it. Great content and great responses, Brian. Thank you. Now we're getting into the rapid fire question round. I'm gonna ask you a series of 10 questions, respond as quick as you can, one word answer, or a short phrase. Are you ready? Lemme take deep breath. Okay, let's do it. What's the most important quality for a great sales leader? Great questions. Email or cold call, which is more effective in today's market. Email. Name one sales tool. You can't live without your ears. What's the biggest myth about sales you wish would go away? That you can sit behind a desk and make sales the best piece of advice you've ever received in your sales career. Be prepared. If you could describe your coaching style in one word, what would it be? Enthusiastic. What's one mistake sales reps make that drives you crazy? They're lazy. Biggest win as a sales leader or coach so far Over a hundred million dollar contract. Excellent. What's your favorite way to celebrate a closed deal? Go sell something else. Excellent. And last question, if you could give your younger sales self one tip about sales, what would it be? Pretend you don't know everything I. Excellent. My guest today is Brian Ian from Atlanta, Georgia with the Sales Coaching Institute. He is a principal, consultant and practice leader of the virtual sales manager, as well as fractional sales leadership practice for the Sales coaching Institute. Brian, if any of our listeners wanna get ahold of you, how can they contact you? The best way is, uh, directly what we've been talking about. You can call me on my phone, (770) 241-2760, or you can email me at Brian p at the Sales Coach us. Great. Thanks Brian and thank you Bestseller Podcast Nation. It's been a high honor and privilege to bring you the best minds in sales, training, coaching, and sales leadership. Carpe diem if you made it all the way here. Thank you for listening to the Best Sellers podcast, your ultimate destination for winning sales strategy. 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