Listen to “53. Sales Advice To Lead, Coach, and Align Your Team w/ Dave Kennet” on Spreaker.
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An amazing customer experience stems from providing a great employee experience. To retain your best team members, they need to be valued. The best sales advice you can take is investing in them to see overall success in your business — through sales coaching, training, and development.
Because ultimately, your employees are the ones interacting with customers day in and day out and building relationships with them. They are the ones that will not only bring you business, but also help you keep it.
And if they don’t have the guidance, tools, and knowledge to provide the optimal customer experience, they will struggle — and your company will, too.
Dave Kennett found himself faced with this challenge throughout his 20 years in sales leadership. To solve this, he founded Replayz, a remote and on-demand sales coaching and training company.
On today’s episode of The Customer Experience Podcast, Dave shares key sales advice, including the importance of sales coaching and sales training. We discuss focusing on CX instead of quotas alone and the value of mentorship and supporting your team. We also touch upon the vital role of video in sales coaching, and interdepartmental alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success.
Dave’s extensive sales career includes tenures as VP/Director of Sales and VP/Director of Business Development in companies like Hootsuite, Payfirma, and Autotrader. Now, as founder and CEO of Replayz, he hopes to provide businesses like these with sales advice and coaching to positively impact their sales reps and, in turn, their customers.
And as far as what makes up a great customer experience, Dave explains that it’s about keeping the Golden Rule in mind: “How would I want to be treated as the customer?”
He details this in the video below…
We can all pretty easily imagine what it’s like to be the customer, especially in sales, where you’re talking with the customer every day. “And ultimately, people vote with their wallets,” Dave points out.
So, we need to take care of these customers because they’re the reason we come to work every day. To give them the CX they deserve, we need to focus on:
1. Understanding each customer’s needs
2. Ensuring that we’re delivering on those needs
3. Providing an excellent experience
Sales Advice To Lead, Coach, and Align Your Team
Video clips and overviews from every episode of The Customer Experience Podcast are available here in our blog posts, but you can also listen to this episode in your favorite player …
Since you’re here, give a listen to the entire conversation with Dave with sales advice for leading, coaching, and aligning your team right here …
Listen to “53. Sales Advice To Lead, Coach, and Align Your Team w/ Dave Kennet” on Spreaker.
Shifting the Sales Focus from Quota to CX
All sales leaders experience the conflicting tension between wanting sales reps to hit or exceed their quotas, while still fostering a great customer experience. In fact, there’s a tendency for businesses to shoehorn customers in at the end of the month to make quotas rather than selectively searching for the right customers.
Dave even confesses pushing salespeople or customers too hard in his career. But he’s learned from his mistakes and realized that the climate that the leader sets is what sales reps will emulate. He discusses this further in the following clip…
“No one is going to win if you’re shoehorning a customer into a product,” he says. “You’re just dealing with a ticking time bomb and future churn issue.”
And if we’re going to focus on CX instead of quotas, our examples need to come from the top.
“It’s really important that the leader is saying, ‘Let’s think with the end in mind,’” Dave explained. “To have happy customers, there needs to be a really good level of fit for their need and what we’re delivering.”
The way to achieve this type of fit is to always put the customer before the quota. And you have to do this even when you’re numbers don’t look too hot during your 6 a.m. huddle on the last day of the quarter.
“As a sales leader, it’s important to tell your team, ‘We need to get across the line, but we also need to look in the mirror and feel good about how we’re doing that and ensure the customer still feels it’s a good experience,’” Dave stresses. “It’s important to have honest communication with customers.”
Ultimately, the way to get those numbers looking attractive is to do the spadework in the weeks and months before the end of the quarter.
The Importance of Mentorship and Supporting Your Team
Dave offered words of wisdom for people stepping into new careers as sales reps or sales managers:
Sales advice to new reps
Getting a mentor early in the game will be more valuable to you as a new sales rep than insight from many other sources, like blog posts or LinkedIn posts. Dave discusses this in the following video…
When Dave reflects on when he grew most in his career, there were three-month sprints in which he saw more progress than he did the entire year. Why? Because 70% of the time he had strong leadership, and the other 30% he requested additional mentorship.
“Don’t wait to hope you’re in that 70% where you have a great leader; seek out mentorships,” Dave says. “Those words of wisdom from that person who’s walked that path are going to be a lot more valuable than reading a paragraph in a book that’s meant for the masses.”
Sales advice to new managers
If you’re a new leader, you’re probably trying to impress your boss. Well, don’t.
Instead, work hard and support your team.
“What you want to do is actually impress your team,” Dave says. “You want to be there to absolutely ensure that they’re getting the level of support they need. So, your biggest challenge as a new leader is to get the respect of your team.”
Take on the new management role with complete humility and open arms to take your sales team to the next level.
The Vital Role of Video in Sales Coaching
Lack of adequate sales coaching is a systemic issue in the industry. Dave recently polled sales reps and discovered two sad truths:
1. On average, 72% reported being coached less than two hours per month
2. Over 30% did not receive any sales coaching at all
When you go back to what’s important to salespeople and what keeps them engaged in their roles — other than their boss — it’s whether they feel valued and whether they feel they’re making an impact. Therefore, when sales leaders are willing to invest in their learning and development, that makes a difference.
Dave explains how Replayz increases the number of hours that sales reps are coached by doing quick touches outside of key selling hours. They provide video-centered feedback based on their recorded calls, repeatable training processes, and live coaching to reinforce sales strategy muscle memory.
In this scenario, the power of video is critical. There are two frames of reference here: the coach to the rep and the rep to their prospect. Video is absolutely essential for both, but especially with the prospect.
He says that in a few years, we’ll be amazed that we didn’t turn our video on for basically all our conversations. He elaborates on this in the clip below…
“Unfortunately, what we see a lot of the time with our clients is that their video is not on, they’re just doing a screen share,” Dave says. “That’s a missed opportunity.”
Just turn on your video.
“The best reps out there are doing this consistently every single time,” Dave says.” It allows a level of building rapport that you just don’t get if you’re not looking at each other eye to eye. You’re able to pick up on nonverbal cues of the prospect, and they’re able to develop trust and credibility from seeing how you conduct yourself in the sales pitch.”
Note: If you’re looking for advice on using video to accelerate sales, you want this book.
Why Sales and Marketing Alignment is Critical
Dave points out that sales teams are turning to marketing too often asking for more and better leads. Sales processes should be clean and optimized before sales leaders start asking for this.
Instead, sales professionals need to put themselves in the shoes of their marketing counterparts and carefully analyze what they’re trying to accomplish.
“Marketing professionals are there because they care deeply about getting quality leads and sending the right number of leads,” Dave says.
Marketers also often tell leaders how hard they work to generate these leads, and that the sales team is wasting the opportunities presented to them. And Dave feels like a lot of the time, they are right.
“We’re not doing enough touches,” Dave says. “We’re not doing enough to care to those leads.”
So, an interdepartmental olive branch needs to be extended to get sales and marketing aligned and on the same track. Dave stresses this in the following video…
“Work together on what your conversion rates are by channel and what the expectations are for growth,” he says.
If you aren’t thinking collaboratively as a marketing or sales leader, you’re missing the point that sales and marketing are riding in the same canoe.
Because at the end of the day, sales success is marketing success and vice versa.
Why CS and Sales Need to Be On the Same Page
Just like marketing, customer success must also be aligned with sales and understand the sales process. Dave clarifies why in the clip below…
“Customer success needs to realize that they’re in sales,” Dave says.
As they navigate conversations with customers, they need to bring empathy and understanding to ensure they’re mitigating and reducing churn rate. They need to keep in mind that:
1. Sales isn’t a dirty word. It’s actually the whole goal.
2. CS has to be comfortable having a number they’re accountable for.
3. They need to understand customer needs to leverage support and knowledge.
In the end, CS is working towards a sales objective. We all are because we are all in sales in one way or another.
This post is based on an interview with Dave Kennett, founder and CEO of Replayz. Watch the following clip to learn why he considers Zoom one of his best experiences as a customer …
CLICK HERE to access the page Dave mentions in the podcast.
Continue With The Customer Experience Podcast
Our goal with this podcast is to increase alignment across marketing, sales, and customer success toward the single most important thing you can do today: create and deliver a better experience for your customers.
Subscribe and listen to episodes like this one right now:
- “Training and Certifying Your Sales Team to Speak Your Customer’s Language” with Alex Rosemblat (VP of Marketing, Datadog)
- “How To Enable Your Sales Team: Practical Tips for Sales Leaders” with Joe Caprio (VP of Sales, Chorus.ai)
- “5 Ways Internal Alignment Can Elevate Your Customer Experience” with Sangram Vajre (Chief Evangelist, Terminus)
Subscribe to hear from our upcoming guests, including:
- Vanessa Van Edwards, Lead Investigator at Science of People, bestselling author of “Captivate,” behavioral researcher and speaker
- Shep Hyken, Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations, Customer Service and Customer Experience expert, and New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author
- Ned Arick, Account Executive at YourWelcome
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Lead, Coach, Train, and Empower Your Team with Video
An essential piece of Dave’s sales advice revolves around embracing video.
And he’s right — top sales performers are crushing it with video in their prospecting. That’s why they thrive. Adopting video email as a main component of your business communication is the right investment on your sales team, as well as your leaders and managers.
It puts your sales reps directly in the inboxes of their recipients in a more personal way. And they are able to stand out from the competition because of it. Your business will reap the rewards.
And “Rehumanize Your Business” is just the book you need to learn how to successfully implement video into your sales processes.
The book is an Amazon #1 bestseller in Business Sales, Business Communication, and Customer Relations, the Porchlight Books #1 bestseller in its opening month of release, and a Barnes & Noble bestseller in its opening week of release.
