Episode 270: Carole Mahoney – Humanizing Sales: Navigating the Intersection of Social Dynamics and Buyer-Centricity

Carole Mahoney

Making sales social is really about focusing on that human aspect, that connection that we have. And in sales, that’s what we need today.

Intro  

Welcome to the Making Sales Social Podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show!

Brynne Tillman

Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m beyond excited today because not only do I have an incredible guest in the world of sales, but she’s my real-life friend, and I love that we’ve had dinner together, we’ve gone to conferences and really hung out. So I’m thrilled to introduce you to the author of “Buyer First: Grow Your Business With Collaborative Selling” and Unbound Growth, founder Carol Mahoney is changing the way the entire sales industry sees itself and how buyers see it, too. She has been called the sales therapist at Harvard Business School, where she is an entrepreneurial sales coach for their MBA program. Oh, my gosh. Harvard Business School. That is amazing. And she’s a keynote that inspires audiences to change the way they view sales and how to put buyers first in all their interactions. Carol and I have overlapping lives, and our lives keep overlapping. Carol, Welcome to the show.

Carole Mahoney

So excited to see you and be here. Thank you so much for having me on.

Brynne Tillman

Oh, my gosh. First of all, this is so overdue, number one. but I’m thrilled that you’re here now. And we just keep overlapping, as we are both now trainers on the Sales Gravy University platform. And our lives keep kind of collaborating, doing things. And now we’re both new NSA members, and we’re excited to do things around that, too. But today, what we’re going to do is the podcast. So, we start every podcast… we ask our guests one first question, Which is: What does making sales social mean to you?

Carole Mahoney

For me, making sales social is really about making it more human, right? Because we are social beings. We love to connect with people. Most of us, there’s a few of us out there that I’m sure that don’t. But making sales social is really about focusing on that human aspect, that connection that we have. 

Like you and I, we first started off being acquaintances and women’s sales pros, and then we started hanging out with each other and interacting on social media. That’s what social is for me, is about that human connection, that human relationship. And in sales, that’s what we need today.

Brynne Tillman

I love that. And I totally align with, you know, it is, know, we met and then you were coming to Philadelphia when I was living there, and we met for. And it builds. Right? And when it comes to making sales social, we may not have had an ROI from knowing each other yet, but we amplify each other’s voice, and we’re out there. So it’s also making sales social is also those, referral partners and networking partners that work into that, too. So I love that answer.

The majority of sales leaders and salespeople say they always put buyers first. As the author of Buyer First, one of the things that I hear out in the world is that companies think they’re doing this. The companies think, “Oh, sure, my buyer is a priority,” but they’re really not. And so, can you just share first? What are they doing wrong, and why do they have this delusion that they are buyer um?

Carole Mahoney

First, The data shows LinkedIn did a survey, two surveys that they called buyer first as well, which was part of the inspiration for the book title. And in those surveys, just as you said, the majority of sales leaders and salespeople said that we always put our buyers first. But when they asked buyers that same question, buyers said, “No, they don’t.” Like, 23% of buyers said, “Yeah, maybe they feel like they’re getting put first.” 

And so there’s obviously this huge disconnect between the way that salespeople see their priorities and the way that buyers feel that they’re being prioritized. And also in that same survey, what they asked was, they asked sales hiring managers, what are the top traits that you look for in salespeople? And it was problem solving, persistence, things like that. Things like active listening were last on the list of hiring managers of what they were looking for. 

When they asked buyers, what are the things do you value most in salespeople? Things like active listening were listed top. So sales managers that are hiring, are looking for traits that are at the bottom of the list that the buyers put as first. And so, a lot of times what’s happening in companies is you hire a new salesperson, and the very first thing that you’re doing is you are inundating them with your sales process and your product. 

And then they’re surprised when their salespeople go out and start pitching products and trying to get buyers to fit into their particular sales process. And it’s a complete disconnect between what buyers actually value, because what’s happening is that there’s this mindset inside of organizations that it’s this inside out kind of, a mindset. Mark Robers actually started talking about this, at Harvard Business School when he’s teaching his class that traditionally we thought of our sales processes coming from inside of our companies out to our customers. 

But today’s buyer is demanding that there’s more collaboration, more active listening, more work with us to come up with what our best solution is, help us think of new things. We need to start thinking of our sales processes and systems from the outside in. How do we bring our buyers into this process more? How do we put them as the priority in all of this and revolve everything in our company around that? But what mostly is happening today is companies. 

It’s like they’re inside the bottle and they can’t see outside of that to see what’s really important to their buyers and customers. And so things like active listening are so crucial to help. I mean, think about it. When you’re talking to someone and they have their phone in their hand, do you feel like you’re actively being listened to? No. That’s exactly how our buyers are feeling. When we’re thinking of what is the next thing that we need to say as a question or how are we going to handle that objection. 

They can sense when we’re checked out and not actually actively listening to them. I think that’s the number one thing that we need to be able to start doing in sales, is how do we start actively listening to our buyers in a way that they feel that they’re being heard and that we’re offering them new insights and data? Because if we’re not offering more value than Google is, we’re not offering any value at all.

Brynne Tillman

So I love this. And one of the things that I hope is being retired is the pitch deck. Because when people open up the presentation and they start going through, here are all the reasons you should work with me. you’re doing exactly the opposite of what you’re talking about today. Right? When a customer says, or when a seller, or company that’s selling says, “Oh, yeah, we really care about our buyers.” Really what they care about is selling to their buyers, not understanding them. Is that what I’m hearing from you?

Carole Mahoney

Absolutely. And you can hear this, like you said in the pitch decks, they typically start with, this is us. This is what we do. These are who our customers are. This is what our customers say. It is all about them. Look at the emails that they’re sending out. It starts off with things all about them. I have this exercise that I have clients go through when I’m reviewing their emails or their phone scripts or whatever. 

I call it the Wee Wee factor. How many times do you say me, we or our in your messaging versus buyer-focused language, which is you, that means, and yours. So they’re wee weeing all over the place and they’re turning buyers off because they’re making it all about themselves. So it’s an easy way to calculate your Wee Wee factor is just go and look and see and count how many times you talk about yourself versus how many times you’re talking about your buyer and the things that they care about. 

And if the ratios are off, then, you know, there’s some small tweaks that you can make right away to that. The amazing thing of this is that the response rate that you get from people is like threefold what it was when you had the previous kind of language. And so it’s, just simple little things like that that we need to start becoming more aware of in how we’re communicating with our buyers that can change the perception they have of us.

Brynne Tillman

I love that. One of the phrases we use a lot is detach from what the prospect is worth to you and attach to what you are worth to the prospect. And I’m hearing a little tie in to what you’re talking about today. What can sellers do differently in that first call to make that shift, to detach from the commission, and attach to learning what that prospect really needs.

Carole Mahoney

So there’s some very simple questions, very simple, open-ended questions that I coach my sellers and managers to use when they’re starting off a conversation. So, for example, one of the few questions that get asked is, “How did you hear about us?” And the reason that it doesn’t get asked is we make a ton of assumptions. They found us through Google, or it was a referral or an introduction. But really digging into how did you hear about us, how did you become aware of this particular situation or issue that you’re dealing with? 

Helps you to understand where your buyer is coming from, where they’ve started from. For example, I get a lot of my business from referrals and introductions, like 90% of it. And when someone gives me a referral from someone that I know, my first question is “What were you and Pete talking about when my name came up?” That gets me to the heart of the issue of what it is that they were discussing and how I was attached to that particular thing, but it’s still about them. What were you talking about? What are you thinking about? 

What do you believe that the problem is? What are some of the things you’ve tried to solve it, and why do you think that worked or didn’t work. And so your buyers know a lot of information already. But as sellers, we have this notion that buyers are x percent of the way through their buying process and so they know already these things, which is true. Which means as a seller, you need to figure out how far along your buyer has already gone and the conceptions and the perceptions that they’ve developed as a result of that. 

And so sometimes just the simplest open-ended questions reveal a wealth of information that helps your buyers feel like this person actually cares about what I think and the process that I’ve gone through to get to this. And they’re not just trying to put me into this qualification bucket and asking me just the questions that they care about in order to pitch me their product.

Brynne Tillman

Oh, I love that. I really love that. And I’m just going to share a quick story from a long time ago. I was on a sales call with someone who started with their own needs. So other than you guys, who else is involved in this? And do you have a budget set aside for this? This was probably almost 20 years ago. And I remember they kicked us out. I will tell you they kicked us out and they go, we don’t know. We just had curiosity. We don’t have a budget for this. We don’t even know what this is.

Carole Mahoney

Right.

Brynne Tillman

And so that was such a game changer for me in my career. And I was the observer of this was like the best salesperson.

Carole Mahoney

Right.

Brynne Tillman

I was like, okay, in a new role. I was like, this is awful. And to your point, their needs were more important than the customer’s needs. That was actually an amazing experience for me because it absolutely changed the way I thought of everything. And now you’re actually putting a process around that mindset.

Carole Mahoney

Yeah. And this is what I see happen that it drives me absolutely crazy. Like probably that salesperson just went through bant training. So they need to get budget and authority and need and timeline. What most people recognize about sales processes is that the sales process is the steps that we need to go through as sellers. They completely ignore what the buyer’s process is. 

And I am religiously trying to convert people that you need to stop looking at your sales process as the holy grail and align your sales process to your buyer’s process. Put that first, because then when you align your process to theirs, you have a more predictable pipeline. You have better close rates and you’re also going to have better relationships with your buyers because you’re following their rules and those who have the gold make the rules. That’s your mind.

Brynne Tillman

So this philosophy, which is brilliant and that you’ve got a process around it, is brilliant, requires an innate curiosity in salespeople. And I think there are some people that just do this naturally because they want to know. They may not even realize that they’re doing this, and that’s why they’re more successful at sales. And if you ask them why, they don’t know, but it’s their curiosity that gets them there. As a sales leader, how do you bring out that curiosity in your team?

Carole Mahoney

Well, a lot of times, what’s getting in our way of being curious are specific mindsets that we have about the actions that we’re about to take. one of the BDR’s that I coached several years ago, his name was Zach. And Zach was struggling with making all of the cold calls that he needed to make. He was struggling with doing the things that he needed to do. He had all of the call scripts. 

He was checking with everybody on his slack channel about what are the things that are working for them? But he was still struggling to get any traction with his cold calls. And so I made him stop. I said, I don’t want you to look up any more best practices. I don’t want you to do anything other than call someone and just have fun with, like, you’re calling one of your buddies and you’re joking around with them. I want you to change your mindset around the actions that you’re about to take. 

Now, for Zach, he had some specific mindsets that were getting in his way. Things like a need for approval. He was worried about what people would think of him. And so when you’re trying to pick up a call and do a cold call, that fear of, like, somebody thinks I’m going to be a pain in the butt to them was stopping him from doing that. He was also struggling with emotional involvement. 

So when he actually got someone on the phone, he would freeze up. He’s like, “I don’t know what to say”, or if he got an objection, he would be like, He was trying to scramble in his brain about what to think. And so by encouraging him to have fun with it, it started to reduce his need for approval. It started to reduce the emotional involvement that he had going into it, because he was just trying to have fun with it. He called me up a couple of days later. He’s like, you’re not going to believe this cold call that I just had. 

Someone had said to me, you know what? I can talk, but I got to go into a meeting for 5 minutes. And he just was like, it seems like everybody is about to go into a meeting in 5 minutes. When I call, it must be something that’s going around. And the person on the other side of the phone just started laughing. And he was able to break the ice, he was able to get the meeting, and all because he simply had fun with the process that he treated the other person as a human being, not another notch on his cold call list. 

And that’s what helped him to get over those mindsets that were getting in the way, and we were able to start digging even deeper into that. By the way, Zach is now one of the top performing AES in his company a few years later, because he continued to build that, having fun with it, being curious about it, and enjoying his sales role as a result.

Brynne Tillman

I absolutely love that. You know, we hear all the time people buy from people, right? So it’s true, though. And one of the things, we have all these one liners, but treat the person on the other side of the message the same way you would if they were on the other side of the table, from a LinkedIn perspective. But it’s a cold calling perspective. It’s an email perspective. Just be natural. Don’t have, I think, structured marketing templates. that’s fine if it’s going out to your mass Email list, but in one on ones. I love that you just said that. Just have a little fun with it and be human.

Carole Mahoney

Yeah. Prospects are people at the end of the day, and that’s one of the things I try to say to my clients is like, we have all of these labels for our buyers. They’re a prospect, they’re qualified. No, they’re a human being who has a problem that they’re trying to figure out to solve so that they can get a raise or save money or something along those lines. They are people just like you and me. 

But when we get into sales, we suddenly start getting all of these hang ups that we didn’t have before, that we would have in social situations for the most part. Because when we get into sales, there’s suddenly this exchange of value that happens, that heightens all of these beliefs that we have and mindsets that we have that start getting in our way. Whenever we start bringing money into a situation, it changes the entire dynamic of the conversation, and we forget that the other person is a person, not just a prospect.

Brynne Tillman

Words to live by. I love that. So I kind of want to go a little bit into your book. I know you did a lot of research. Like most people write a book, especially a sales book, there’s not a whole lot of research that went into it. I think maybe the challenger customer, or the challenger sale, was probably the last book I know that did some deep research, but you did for this. So can you share a little bit about what that process was and why it was so important to you to have data before you published your book?

Carole Mahoney

Buyer first. Well, I’ll start with the why. You can see all of the books behind me here, and this is just a small fraction of the ones that I have that are on my kindle. And there is a ton of sales advice out there. There’s an Alphabet soup of sales processes, whether it’s bant or spin or whatever the case may be. And so we go through this cycle in sales of having, like, what this is working today, but it’s not based on actual scientific research. And so it might work in some situations, it doesn’t work in other situations. 

And the other reason that research was so important to me is I look at sales today as if we’re in a renaissance age, Right? Like, if you think of the medical profession prior to the renaissance, medical profession today, they’re very highly trusted and respected individuals. But before the renaissance, they were seen as barbarians and butchers and religious fanatics because they blindly followed the teachings of just a few people. 

That then didn’t necessarily apply in the circumstances and situations. It wasn’t until the medical profession started introducing the scientific method and dissection and anatomy that they started to gain the level of respect that they have today. We are in the same place in sales today. Buyers have a disdain. We all have a disdain towards sales. If you read Daniel Pink’s book to sell as human, seven out of ten of us still think of sales as pushy, slimy, and sleazy, because there’s never been a solid body of research to guide us as to how this should work with today’s buyer. 

And that’s the other thing, is it’s always reiterating, it’s changing. Buyer behaviors are changing today. And so the research was important to me because I didn’t want it to be. This is just my experience. But also digging into why is the experience that I and my clients have happened this way? What’s going on underneath all of this? Because when we understand why something is happening, then we know what to be able to do about it in a more predictable way. And so that part was really important for me. 

Because I didn’t want it to be just my opinion. Like every other book that I’ve read out there, there’s a few out there like David, Hoffel’s book, the science of selling was one of the things that really inspired me to really dig into the research, because I will admit I was a little intimidated by reading neuroscience studies and sociology studies and all of the things that I dug into because I didn’t think of myself as a scientist. But the truth is that you don’t have to be a scientist to understand some of the psychological principles that are happening, and then using the data behind that to help us understand how this might play out in a predictable way. 

That’s why it was so important to me. And so the process that I started using was, I started taking the scientific process, basically. So I was observing a particular behavior or something that was happening out in the wild, in my coaching clients, in my own sales processes, and then I started digging into the research. The data behind why is that? That’s how I started digging into medical journals and neuroscience studies and behavioral studies and all of the sciences around how we change mindsets and behaviors and make decisions.

And started to see patterns of things that were happening and explaining why the experience that I and my clients and others were having, why that was happening that way, which then led me to conclusions on, all right, if this is why it’s happening, then what does the research say about how to actually change that or move through that? And so the research for me was a journey in of itself, because I learned a lot through the process. The funny thing was, I did twelve years of research and two years of writing for the book. 

And as I was doing the research, I was testing it out. I was testing it out in my own sales process. I was testing it out with my coaching clients, who I lovingly call my lab rats. Thank you very much, everyone. because I wanted to, as the scientific process goes, you observe something, you do research, and then you test. And it was through the testing and reiteration that I started to develop the process that I now put into the book and coach and teach clients on. 

And I fully expect that as we go through that scientific process in the coming years, that there’s going to be changes to the process, because again, buying processes changes. It’s not like you run this experiment once and that’s it. And that’s it forever. The way the scientific process works is you get peer reviews and you have other people contributing their research and experiences to it, and now you start to have a whole body of research on that, and that is ultimately what I would love to see happen in sales. We have a body of researchers and scientists that are starting to dig into the causes of these things and reiterating best practices according to that.

Brynne Tillman

I love that. Sounds like a Harvard Business review paper that you might be publishing in the future.

Carole Mahoney

Potentially, let’s hope. Yes.

Brynne Tillman

This has been great. you have brought so much value in such a short period of time, and I am so excited for people to start rethinking what buyer first really means. Not what you think it means, but what it truly means. The last question I ask almost everyone is, What is the one question I didn’t ask you that I should have?

Carole Mahoney

The one question that you didn’t ask that you should have? I think it’s probably, why did I decide to go into sales at all?

Brynne Tillman

Great. Take it from there.

Carole Mahoney

Yeah. And, so I decided to go into sales kicking and screaming. Like, honestly, I got my degree in marketing, and when my college advisor said to me, well, you’d be a really great salesperson, and here’s a list of jobs, I stopped him right there. I’m like, “No, if it’s got sales in that title, I want nothing to do with it.” But it wasn’t until I started my own business that I had to confront my own sales beliefs and mindsets. I actually had a marketing agency before I started getting into sales. 

And what was interesting is that I had to start confronting my own beliefs and mindsets about sales in order to be successful in my business. And in the process of doing that, I fell in love with sales. And I’m still sometimes kind of pinching myself that I wrote a sales book. I talk about sales every day. And when my mom asks me what I do, when I tell her that I talk to salespeople every day on purpose, she just gives me this look like, “Who are you?”

But it was because of the process of understanding what sales was really all about that made me fall in love with it that I say, “Everything is sales.” Sales is life. Whether you’re a kid trying to convince the parent or the teacher trying to convince them to do their homework, we’re all doing sales every single day. It’s just whether or not we see ourselves as salespeople. Yeah.

Brynne Tillman

And I love that. And if your buyer is your four year old kid, you have to understand their motivations and their why, because they’re not going to do what you need them to do unless they know the benefit to them. I love that. How can people get a hold of you?

Carole Mahoney

The easiest way to get a hold of me is to find me on LinkedIn. Send me a message. Let me know that you saw me on this podcast with Brynne. I love connecting with people there. That’s where I spend the majority of my time. But you can also go to carolemahoney.com, which is my speaking website, or my commercial training website, which is unboundgrowth.com.

Brynne Tillman

And it’s Carole with an E, Carole.

Carole Mahoney

With an E, and Mahoney with an E. So don’t forget the E.

Brynne Tillman

Don’t forget the E’s. All right, well, thank you, Carole, as always. I love spending time with you, and you have brought so much value to my network and to our network and to the world. So thank you so much. And for all the listeners, when you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro  

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