Empathy in the Digital Age: Navigating Human-Centric Sales with Shawn Sease

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting edge strategies to keep teams human centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights needed to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. How do we maintain genuine human connections and navigate the complexities of sales in an age dominated by technology and automation? In an era where chatbots and AI dominate interactions, Shawn Sease stands out by championing the irreplaceable value of human connection in sales. As the founder of iNeverAnswer.com, and with over 30 years of experience in outbound sales, he argues against the allure of quick victories, focusing instead on trust, empathy, and strategic partnership as the cornerstones of enduring success. So join us today on the Future of Teamwork podcast as we welcome Shawn, the professor of prospecting. Tune in to learn first, why Shawn believes you need trust before empathy in sales. Shawn emphasizes that trust is essential for genuine empathy in sales, laying the groundwork for deeper customer relationships. Second, why you might want to put team goals over individual achievements. Dane and Shawn discuss aligning incentives with team goals to foster a collaborative and high performing sales environment. Finally, they'll discuss the importance of selling as adding to customer strategy. Shawn positions the future of selling as a partnership where sales efforts are directly tied to enhancing customer strategic objectives. So teamwork makes the dream work and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team, put on your headphones and let's dive in together there.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of the Huddl3 Group, and today I'm joined by Shawn Sease. Shawn is the professor of prospecting and he's the founder of iNeverAnswer. com. So we've just been having some great conversations around sales teams and sales dynamics. Welcome to the show, Shawn. Looking forward to the conversation.

Shawn Sease: Thank you very much for having me, Dane. I'm looking forward to having a good conversation with you.

Dane Groeneveld: Tell us a little bit more about you. How did you come to be doing all this cool work in prospecting?

Shawn Sease: Yeah. Well, I've got a long lengthy background in sales. I always think of even when I was really young, I was that goofball kid that was selling chocolate bars or raffle tickets or things like that. I had a paper route, all that stuff. So it's just a kind of funny story. When I think about my history, I've always been out pedaling something or selling something or working in my father's auto shop or so on. I was born and raised in the Bay Area in the Silicon Valley, and so in the early'90s, even right after high school and college, I submerged myself in high- tech sales and things like that. Even had some opportunity to work in a mail room for a software development company while I was in high school. So I spent my whole entire life in high- tech sales all the way from having ads in the back of a magazine and getting the little bingo cards that got mailed in to the company and we'd follow up, all the way to the evolution, fast- forward today to what I would call the over specialization of roles and the proliferation of tech stack tools or what I call tech stack Tetris for salespeople.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that. We're going to have to dive into that.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. That was part of that provisioning conversation we were having earlier. The endless provisioning of your tech stack. One more tool and we'll be ready to charge the hill.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, it's so true. I've worked with a lot of sales teams that I've had the pleasure to manage over the years and I've looked at a number of companies that we buy from and a number of companies that we advise or we look at acquiring and there's a common theme out there that cold calling's dead and our best salespeople should be getting really good leads to go and close. And it confuses me because in my day on the phone, I was building it all. I didn't have someone handing me a really juicy lead. I was working the phone book, calling people, finding out how to adjust my message, and I wasn't specialized. I was an all- rounder. So that seems to have changed a lot. When did you see that shift to that over specialization?

Shawn Sease: Well, I had an interesting little gap in my high- tech journey. Around 2004 or so I had a little business that I built in far northern California after I moved from the Bay Area up to northern California. It was an electronic document storage company. I was designing systems for city government's, police departments, city clerk's office, county clerk reporter, assessor's office, so on. Electronic document storage systems. It was at the time when copy machines could be printers and scanners so just a natural evolution. So during that time I was working locally. I was detached from the internet. And back to 2004 still, I was running around with a Blackberry. The exciting to write emails to people on your phone with a full qwerty keyboard and so on. But around 2004 I sold that business and built a brewery. So from 2004 to about 2009, somewhere in there, I ran the brewery and then I sold that. But during that time, I came back to high- tech sales and there had been this new role that had developed, the SDR role, the sales development role. So I kind of jumped on the bandwagon and said, hey, let's check this out. And it seems to me that that role was probably a really good idea when, like I said, people were excited to get emails and there was all this new technology and you've got mail. And so you would reply to an email and things like that. But fast forwarding to today, I think that somewhere along the line we got carried away. We've got so over specialized that you've got everybody busy trying to get something started. They're provisioning something or trying to get something going. And maybe even being what I would consider being too precise. Letting the data and letting everything get in the way. To say, hey, if I build a list, nail my ICP, nail my persona, download the list, clean the list, do all these things, and then you go out and do that and then a lot of people don't answer the phone or when they do answer the phone, it's not the right person. And so this specialization has caused this razor sharp precision in the process that just never really existed in sales. Sales was always turn over a rock like, " Hi. How are you? What do you do? What's your role there? How can we help each other?" Today it's so laser focused like this is my ICP, this is the persona, these are the objections, this is how you handle it. Everyone has become like a binary number on a spreadsheet or something, but I don't want to get too carried away and say we've lost the human touch or things like that. But it seems like we have because people are just afraid to pick up the phone. I don't really know. Earlier you said cold calling is dead and that to me is just always synonymous with... Which is fine. It's synonymous with I don't like to do it. I'm not very good at it. I don't have very much luck with it. All of those things to me are table stakes for doing cold calling. If you don't accept out of the gate that you're not going to be very good at it, no one's going to want to hear from you and a lot of people are going to say no, you've got the wrong idea. Well, I would submit that cold calling is dead to you if you don't realize that that's what you're up for when you're doing it. But I don't know how else you're going to go out and... How would you say it? Go out there and actually attack or introduce yourself to the accounts that are worthy of doing outbound work to. I think that we end up with confusion there too is companies say, " Hey, let's hire some SDRs and get the word out." Well, it doesn't really pencil out mathematically if you don't have the right size offer. In other words, if you're selling a$ 20 a month little widget that hangs out in the browser for 140 bucks a year or something like that, it's really hard to put an outbound team on that without some unlimited amount of money. But there's a ton in there. I'll stop because I kind of went all over the place in there.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I love it. I love it. It's funny, it takes me back to baseball. As an Australian, learning baseball has been weird. And I look at batters in baseball and just how hard it is for them to get on base. And so baseball isn't for everyone, but those people that are good batters and just have the nerve and are willing to go out and bat. 200 or.300, they get paid a lot of money and they have a lot of success and they're key players in the teams that they're a part of and kind of feels like there may be some parallels there with the salespeople who are willing to do the cold calls and do that hard work to get on base.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. It's so boring though, isn't it? I mean, it's so boring. And that's the other part that there's nothing glamorous about it. And I enjoy using baseball and football analogies, but on the fundamental side of things to not get carried away. I remember years ago I was in... This is a long time ago. 30 years ago, I was in the Marine Corps and I was stationed at Fort Lee, Virginia going to a class, and one of the corporals there was in charge of running this baseball team as part of the goodwill, whatever, running the baseball team on the base. And he didn't know anything about baseball and said, " Hey, Shawn, can you help me out with this?" Because I think I was bragging about my sister being in the World Series of softball or something. So sure. So I went out there and I started coaching these kids and I was coached by my dad and so on, but they didn't have a clue how to play baseball. I mean, they didn't have a clue around the fundamentals. If there's two outs and the ball's hit here, what do you do? And so all I did for the first couple of weeks was focus on the fundamentals. 100% the fundamentals. And sure enough, we started with the best thing that happened was the team started to play together as a team and we basically built a functioning team. We won some games, and the highlight was that they were like seven, eight year old kids playing together, having fun, and their parents were excited to see them having fun, but it's because they were working together as a team or a unit and that all came from everyone agreeing to focus on the fundamentals and the basics. So I use the sports analogies all the time. Like base hits, wins the game, first downs, first downs. That takes me all the way back to some of the training we do for cold calling is in every single engagement that you're having is let's make the baseline that we've started a two- way engagement, a two- way rapport because anything could be happening at any given time. And what I mean by that is get into some of the tactics here. The simple fundamental cold calling is, " Hey Dave, it's Shawn over iNeverAnswer and hey, you're not expecting my call today. It's the first time I tried to reach you. You got half a minute and I'll share with you why I picked up the phone to give you a call today?" My training there doesn't have anything to do with objection handling or trying to trick anyone or whatever. I'm 100% sincere. " You're not expecting my call. You don't have any idea who I am. And the reason I'm reaching out to you is I really want to get some time on your calendar so that I can formally introduce myself and my company would next week work for you?" And I know for a fact that people are going to say at that moment in time something like, " Hey, hold on. You haven't even told me what you do." " Well, thanks for asking. I already know the answer, but let me ask you, have you even heard of my company? iNeverAnswer. com. Are you familiar with us, seen us on a blimp during the Super Bowl, on the side of a bus, anything?" " No, I haven't." " Good. That's why I was calling to introduce myself." And so my whole point is the most basic fundamental thing that's happening there for me is in that little three stage opener, have I developed a rapport with you so that we can actually talk about something worthwhile? Because number one, I interrupted you. So using the data for something useful. For example, what is the average length of our cold calls? And when we go in and look at the average length of a cold call, we see that it's somewhere between one minute and eight seconds and a minute and 30 seconds. So using that data and not being overly precise, you could ask the question, what could we really get away with in a minute and eight seconds? We'd probably introduce ourselves and find out if now is an okay time to talk for just another minute or two or not. And when you start doing that, then you're not even training on product or features or whatever you're talking about, one- to- one engagement with another human being, period. And so ultimately those follow- ups become, " Hey, Dane, I called you yesterday and you were kind enough to tell me that I couldn't have caught you at a worse time, and you also let me know that now was probably a better time. Did we get it right or you're running out the door again?" Again, I am still not even in the neighborhood of talking about what I do or can I help you or whatever. Have you and I established a two- way thing where I'm not some stranger that you're afraid to talk to, period? And when you do that over and over and over and your callers start to learn that, hey, if I keep doing this, in a month or two months or three months, I'm going to have a follow- up list of people who I can call all day long. They'll answer the phone and tell me whether or not they're still where they were the last time or if they're ready to throw it out the window or if the buying window's open or whatever. But I'm going to be there when the timing is right. And again, this all goes to are we doing outbound to a group that we can afford to do it to and that all the planets line up that we're doing the right thing. Which again makes me kind of contrarian to popular advice because everyone's always looking at this through the tactical window of the moment I get on the call with you. And I look at it through the lens of, no, our goal is to put you Mr. Rep... Especially at the top of the funnel, our goal is to put you in eight to 12 conversations per hour. We'll do that with the data and the dialer and so on. Your job is to follow this process, to curate that list and to more follow- ups downstream so that over three, six, nine, 12, 18 months, when we get on the phone in the morning, we call our follow- ups that are due for today, the ones that came out of a bad timing call yesterday. Then we slowly work our way backwards to the ice cool ones where we're putting them forward into those buckets, moving them forward, and then that way these 10,000, 100, 000, quarter million, seven figure deals, you start to have a process that's using the fundamentals to fill up those buckets and make everything moving forward.

Dane Groeneveld: I like the two- Way rapport. Rapport, sorry. Because there are too many calls where people are just straight away trying to hit me with features, and I find that frustrating. If someone calls me and they're human, and then if I hit them with an objection and they actually listen, I hate it when they ask me a question, " But are you sure your business can afford to do this?" I'm like, " You're not connecting with me here, dude. No, I'm not. I can't speak to you." And hang up the phone. But if they're like, " Yeah. When would be a good time?", I feel listened to. It feels good.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. I would agree with that. It seems like coming when you come back at somebody in a minute or two minute interruption call where you know that you're interrupting them, you have all of that stuff. Again, that goes back to whether... The anti fragility part. Some people have that ability that they don't even consider the objection to be something to be offensive, where other people just cannot handle it. They cannot physically bear the idea of the rejection in a cold call. Then there's another group of people who, I wouldn't say that they get fuel from it, but it certainly doesn't bother them. They certainly go after the next call. But to me, that would make it really two different games. There are people that are really heavy into objection handling and hey, you're only going to have one chance to shoot your shot, and I couldn't disagree with that more. You should be... I shouldn't say should. That's a horrible word. Chris Beal taught me. That's should's a terrible word. It's a very offensive word. What you should do is if I know what's the right thing to do is.

Dane Groeneveld: I haven't heard that, but I'm going to use it.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. It turns out I said that to him one day. Should. He's like, " You know that's a really bad word, don't you?" Then I had to go ... The scholarly side of me said, okay, I'm stupid again. Something I've missed my whole entire life. I better go study. Sure enough, all the scholarly documentation is right there. Should is a bad word in business. But who knew?

Dane Groeneveld: Who knew?

Shawn Sease: So if we get back to the over specialization of roles here... And again, I always want to preface that with we get to be these talking heads who sit back and talk about the right way to do it. And over the years I've developed this mantra that there is no right way. There's only what works. So when somebody listens to this and they go, " Oh no. Shawn, the professor of prospecting, he's wrong." Well, you're probably right. You're probably 100% right that I'm wrong. If something's working really well for you, and I'm saying that that isn't the way to do it, obviously I am wrong and I wouldn't suggest that you change anything. I'd say double down, triple down, quadruple down. But there's just so many different variables and it's really hard to talk abstractly about outbound or revenue because the situations are so, so different. Another example of that is recently I talked to a CEO founder who reached out to me and said, " Hey, I'm looking for some help with my outbound team." We went on to discuss what he saw. " We're really PLG." And so I try to be funny. Humor is my thing, dry humor. So I said, " So let me say that back to you. When you say that you're PLG, what I heard you say is that you're starving for pipeline." And he's like, " Well, I guess you could put it that way." It was just one of those funny things where he was very confident. " We're running a PLG motion, but we need help with our outbound." So I said, " Well, what you just said to me is that you're PLG, but you're starving for pipeline." And that always seems to be the case with everyone who's PLG, that you come up with all these different acronyms and there's still nothing new under the sun. I go back to this fundamental thing of, " Hey, I was calling to introduce myself and my company." People are like, " Well, what do you do?" " Well, good, let's have that conversation. Now I know that I've interrupted you, so let's put some time on the calendar." Or does it make sense to you? Where are you? You've got other deadlines? What are you working on, Dane? What's happening? And I think that when people drive by with words like empathy and things like that, empathy is a really hard thing to actually inject into the sales process without trust. I think it's impossible. It's like an order of operations thing and people toss that around. And so when I think of empathy in sales, I always think of preemptive objections. Knowing I'm an interruption, knowing that... I would be shocked if you haven't been looking at this or if you didn't already have some systems in place. I'd be shocked. As opposed to calling up people saying, " Hey, I talked to another guy who looks, talks, acts just like you." Basically my persona template. You fit into my persona template. So everything I was told leads me to believe that you too should fit into this mold. And again, that gets into discovery. We're not actually having a discovery. We're actually trying to see if you fit through this magical silhouette, right? Turn it sideways and see if you match my body type. Something like that. Can you go through this magical silhouette as opposed to building enough trust with somebody where they would say, " Shawn, we'd love to do this, but we got this guy over in accounting who there's no way it's going to get past him. If we were going to do something, we need to get his daughter and his sister and his mom and everyone else on board." If you're not having those kind of conversations... That's probably a little dramatic with the sister and the mom, but the idea is that I think that people do buy from people that they trust. I mean that sincerely. Again, not in a cliche way. I mean that in a way where otherwise they would do it themselves. There's those four little questions like... Well, we have three or four. Why don't you just do it in- house? Why don't you do it in- house? Or what have you tried that didn't work? Why are we talking right now? How come we weren't talking 30 days ago? Or why don't we wait for another 30 days, Dane? Why don't we hold off for 30 days and why are we talking now?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. There's an honesty to that and I like the way that you use the word discovery because one of my fears with overspecialization is if you put your most junior people, your most browbeaten people in the SDR role, and they finally get to connect with someone, if they don't have the skills to do the discovery, then how many potential leads, potential customers are we turning off just because we were only trying to get them from A to B, we weren't really trying to hear who they were and find out leads on who the internal coach or blocker might be.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. I think that we were talking about the over specialization of roles. That's another thing that I've been noticing that it just seems to be a theme, and I'm not sure if it's just a LinkedIn echo chamber theme in that the SDR role or the top of funnel role is getting so specialized that you can go anywhere and have a company put together... People are building solutions where they're tying everyone's APIs together and putting a dress on it so that you could have a list built, all the information enriched and so on and pumped into your database. But to me, again, that's all... I guess you could do it and it probably doesn't cost very much, but it's just so much cart before the horse kind of stuff where you're trying to be so precise about who it is that would from your product without knowing anything about the human side of the organization and there's all these bets going on at the top of the funnel. How would you say that? I have a hard time reconciling. This is just me. It's probably something that I'll eventually learn to do or the light bulb will go off in my mind, but right now I'm being stubborn about it. People are using the SDR role and hoping, I think, that intent data will reveal who's in the buying window now, and I've never known that to work in my 30 plus years of sales. Actually, I like how it worked much better in the'90s because marketing... It was set up so that there wasn't so much information available. That's what everyone says now. There's so much information available now that buyers don't need to have a sales rep in their process. But then when you dig deeper into that and you ask the Gardner guys, well, what's the caveat to that? And you say specifically the two things that happened in a closed situation where they either buy from you or they buy from somebody else or they make no decision. And what the Gardner guys told me when I asked them straight up during a dinner one time, what's the negative side of too much information available? And the answer is... I already knew what it was, but the answer is no decision and buyer remorse. That people are deciding not to do anything or they're buying the wrong thing because they trusted social proof and so on, didn't go through a proper discovery, didn't actually go through and have somebody help them with the selection process and so on and made a mistake. So I was saying that I liked it better when my inside sales job was getting... Earlier, we were talking about the little bingo cards, right? Marketing was putting ads in magazines. The only place people were getting information about new stuff was magazines. They make a little note on a card, they'd send the card back in. We'd get those leads, we'd follow up and we would sell stuff to them. The system worked, right? Now there's 10,000 or 10 million different products for solutionism. There's so many different products that people are building that fall into the nice to have camp and then they get a bunch of money to try to sell it to people, but it's still just a nice to have. There's no number of SDRs, there's no amount of marketing, there's no intent data, there's no nothing that's going to change it from being a nice to have. It's getting noisy and loud out there. It's getting hard.

Dane Groeneveld: It is. It's super hard, and you look at the amount of tools... I want to get into this tech stack Tetris in a minute because I don't think that's unique to the sales organization. I think every HR, finance, customer success, you name it, everyone's got so many tools and they don't work well together. People often buy a tool to solve a problem which is poorly defined, and then realize that the tool doesn't really solve the problem, and it takes us away from a lot of human connection and human behaviors. So it is interesting just the fatigue and how many sales processes end up in a no decision because no one really has a driving force. No one really has the buying decision in an organization which has already got 25 tools on board.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. Well, another thing that's super interesting to me about how important and how useful it is to have a person in the sales process, but everything that we're doing... And I mean everything we're doing from an inability to self- regulate at the top of the funnel is making it harder and harder and harder. For the last three or six months, everyone's been in an uproar about Google and Yahoo changing their rules about emails, deliverability, and even before that, there was this big push for multi- domain rotation, so you got to have 20 different domains and only send out 25 emails per inbox, per domain and so on. And to me, that's drilling way too far down. I mean, at some point you have to say, hey, we're optimizing shit that shouldn't exist at all. Why do we continue to drill down to the point where... I mean, that has to be terminal. I mean, if it's 25 emails per inbox per domain, is it going to be five or none eventually? At some point you have to stop that because it doesn't work, but there's no end. I don't think there's any end in place, and what sales is doing to itself is it's actually eliminating the rep by default. Leadership's inability to self- regulate what's going to wipe the rep out completely because how much more noise can a rep... I mean the AI and automation can create way more noise way faster than reps can. Reps will make mistakes by putting in variables in the brackets. AI probably won't do that. You'll probably have the person's name in the brackets and not making stupid mistakes like humans do when they're in charge of automation.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair.

Shawn Sease: We're busy working ourselves out of a job. But the other part that's odd to me about all of the tools, talking about tools, is that there's so much precision. Before we even go out and have conversations with people to get an idea of what the market... I'm not a big fan of these kinds of phrases either, but I'll say them because they're popular. Like message market fit. Then product market fit at the top of the funnel. Phone validated data. Get your phone numbers validated. Do this, do that, get all these things in place. And you haven't even talked to anyone. You don't have any information from anyone about anything, and you're building this super high precision, laser guided thing. And then you find out that you've built this whole apparatus and it didn't reach the target. It blew up everything else except for the target's still standing there laughing, going, I didn't even notice. I didn't even notice you were there.

Dane Groeneveld: That's scary too.

Shawn Sease: Yeah, you obliterated your ability to reach the first one. But it's not even worth talking about. I can't stop it. There's no stopping it. There's absolutely no stopping it.

Dane Groeneveld: But is there an argument... And we've seen this time and time again. We've seen vinyl records come back recently in a big way. Is there an argument that some people are just going to go retro and say, " Hey, forget the tools. Let's just go and be salespeople and pick up the phone and go to trade shows and stick to what used to work." Is there going to be a movement in that direction for certain teams, certain businesses?

Shawn Sease: Yeah. I think some of us are still doing that. When we do discovery calls or start putting together new campaigns, we do our very best to try to set expectations around the amount of time that it takes to actually build these follow up lists, because a lot of people in third party outbound services, they'll promise meetings and things like that like we'll get you this many meetings per month. And I'm not a big fan of that because if we get meetings in the very beginning of a campaign, it's probably one of three things. One, we just got absolutely lucky, which is a byproduct of prospecting every day. When you call up somebody and they say, " Oh, wow. Look at you, Shawn. We just came from a meeting yesterday where we were talking about this very thing. So look at you." You don't turn around to the leaderboard and say, " I'm number one." That's a byproduct of doing the job. The other nine people you're going to talk to are going to say, " I don't take cold calls. Don't call me back." And so on. I'm not actually sure where I was going with that. Where was I going with that?

Dane Groeneveld: You were saying if you get meetings in the first month of a campaign, it's because you're either lucky and then you said there might've been one or two other things.

Shawn Sease: Right. Thank you very much. It was around setting expectations with new clients to say, this is going to take time to build these follow- up lists so that we intersect someone's interest to talk to us or intrigue to talk to us with some semblance of timing. That's what makes curating your list and follow up so important. Just a rep in there who's mapping out accounts, having conversations with people, asking questions about different areas of the business or so on, and realizing that this is just a big game of timing. It's always weird when you talk about follow up too, because you almost have to put a line in the sand to say, I'm talking about long- term follow up with people who are not in our pipeline, who are not actively in a deal. People that were trying to get into a pipeline because pipeline follow up is different. When people say, " Hey, you can't just call to check in on someone." Well, I would imagine that if you have someone in your pipeline and they're in deal stage two, then no, you probably shouldn't be calling to follow up. You should be calling about something or driving it to the next step or already have another meeting set up because that's different. But long- term follow up to actually get people in the pipeline or get aligned with their buying window wherever, doing business together, that's what that tip- top of funnel work is all about. Not calling people and trying to bend them to your will to get them into a buying cycle. It takes time and when somebody says the words like, yeah, we wanted to try out your service for a month, I usually come back pretty quick and say, " Well, how about you just send me the 5, 000 bucks, we don't do any work for you. We shake hands and go our separate ways." Because that-

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. And that's being slightly facetious, but that's really what's happening there. It's like we got a lot of work to do. You may have an idea of what people will put up with, but conceptually what I'm hearing you say is that you believe that there's an outfit out here that can call, get you meetings and get things in the pipeline. Now, that could happen, coincidentally. That could happen, but it's not going to be an exception to the rule. We need some time here. We needed some time for a handful of things to figure out if you're correct about who you are targeting. Does your message resonate? Do you have to come up with another message? How many touches? So on and so forth. Outbound is just a long never ending finite game. It never ends. But people are getting super, super... It's precision. There's not enough fuzziness. Everyone's saying, " Hey, use intent data to contact the people who are in the buying window now." And to me, I just have to say, well, if we're doing something super innovative and super it's not just 100% commoditized, they don't know it exists. They wouldn't even know what we're doing. I think leading into all of those three different... There's probably four different ways. This is one thing I like about Anthony Iannarino and the books that he's read. And I love Anthony because the first book he ever wrote is... What's the title of it? Something like The Only Sales Book You'll Ever Need, and then he went on to write three more and then he makes fun of himself in the subsequent books.

Dane Groeneveld: I'll have to check that out.

Shawn Sease: But even on his blog, he lays out a really, really strong framework for orientating yourself correctly for sales in general, and he just calls it the four levels. The four levels. Level one would be your product. Very commoditized. What our product does. The features and benefits. Level two selling would be selling the ability that we can support it. We have a customer success team. We can support it. It works. You'll get support. If it doesn't work. We'll fix it if it's broken and so on. Again, super commoditized, right? Anyone can build a product. AI can reproduce it. You should be able to support it. No problem. Again, super commoditized selling. Third would be pains and problems. Do you have a pain or problem we can solve? Again, we've gotten to the point where solutionism has taken over. There's an LCD screen on the refrigerator, and when I pull the milk out, it knows when I got milk last time and it puts milk on my list again. How did we ever get along without that? Something we don't need. It's their. Solutionism, right? So pains and problems would be level three. Again, super, super commoditized. Commoditized. Everyone can solve the same pains, the same problems. They can talk the same value. And everyone's talking about value the same way, which is, " Hey, Dane, I work with people who look just like you who have this problem, so you should have it too. Let's have a meeting and we'll fall in love too." I don't know. I tried to make a rhyme there. And that's tired broken selling too. So you get to what Anthony Iannarino classifies as level four, which is strategic selling. That, hey, I am trying to enter this conversation from a strategic partnership, like a level. Coming at you with wanting to learn and discover more about where you guys are going in this organization and strategically and could our solution be a part of your strategic future. Now, the reason why I bring that up is that it seems to me that if you work your process backwards from wanting to be a strategic partner with people that then you can walk it all the way back to, " Hey, I was calling to introduce myself and my company." You go back to very fundamentals of trying to get to know someone so that you could be useful and trusted as opposed to, hey, I've needed abundantly obvious that you're on a list of people who one, two, three, four, five, score 12 is why I'm talking to you. Because you fit into some little scoring thing that we put together that reduced you to a data set. Where instead I'm calling you to introduce myself to get to know you so that we can build enough trust to where maybe you would share secrets about the person from accounting who's having a divorce or whatever. It's just my way of staying grounded. That coming from the level four. And it goes all the way back to our original thing. If we have not started a two- way rapport, if you're not genuinely telling me that, " Hey, look man, right now, it's horrible. I wish I could tell you, but my wife's dad... Hospital." You're like, " Dude, you got to go, man. I'll talk to you later. Best wishes for dad on the way to the hospital, man." As opposed to someone training you to say, " Hold on. If you give me 30 seconds, I can sure I can show you the value that'll change..." The point I was trying to make was coming from that level four, from that position of strategic partner and being at the same level with somebody. I have this other one. It's on my page there that my only goal with everything that I do is that we end up better off than where we started, and that includes, " Hey, man, take me off your list because I'm never ever going to talk to you because I do not like the sound of your voice."

Dane Groeneveld: Absolutely.

Shawn Sease: Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Shawn Sease: And you go, "Perfect. That's what I needed to know. Thank you very much. We're better off than where we started. I appreciate that. I'm out of here."

Dane Groeneveld: It's a win. No, I agree. I agree. One of my friends that I met recently, he said to me the other day, " Sometimes when you find the problem, you should just stop and celebrate. Because A, it might be a problem that you both agree to solve together, or B, it may be a problem that suggests that you guys have no business talking to each other. But either way, you now have clarity and direction, whether it's walking away from each other or walking towards each other." So it's pretty cool. I got a final question for you on teamwork. In the world of prospecting, and that comes down to incentives. Does your team or have you personally had a view on the way that we've broken out incentives and whether they actually align with sales teams and SDRs, account executives, higher ups working together on sales processes?

Shawn Sease: Yeah. There's so much inside of that question in that I think sometimes it comes down to personalities too. That your actual personality type can sometimes dictate or often will dictate what kind of team you like to work in. And since I came back from the brewing world and the whole entire world, even after COVID has gone remote and so on, there's been a lot of personality things have surfaced that I didn't notice before in office work. You get a different version of people remotely, it seems. I don't know if it's the stress or what it is. But to answer your question directly, I am much more of a people before process kind of person, which it's a double- edged sword for me because sometimes I'm not as rigid on the process as I should be. I need people around me that are rigid on the process to keep me in check because I'm much more of the trust, emotional, what's going on with you, we'll see it through, so on. So I need somebody beside me or with me to help me on the black and white process side sometimes. But to answer your question directly, I'm more of a let's pay everybody on the whole entire team winning our North Star goal. I think it's Campbell's law, right? There are all these different... Pareto and Parkinson's, all these different things. Campbell's law, that's the one where... I'm going to paraphrase this and probably just destroy it. But if there's a metric that we're aiming at, we'll figure out a way to game it, right? We'll figure out a way to game that metric and the metric becomes useless. Again, it's one of these questions where I don't have the right answer because it seems to me that incentivizing, let's say, BDRs on meetings set is a really good incentive for an SDR to get meetings off a list, but the leadership, the C- suite would've had to have buy- in on the fact that the SDRs aren't making their own list. That the organization strategically mandated that BDRs... Your job is to sell the meeting to the names on this list. Period. Do not qualify, do not do anything. What we need for you is to get these people into a 20 or 30 minute window where we have the space to have a legitimate conversation. That's your only job. Period. And if that's the case, then you can incentivize those SDRs on those meetings set because you have a milestone there that doesn't involve anybody else. But if you don't have that in place... And again, I'm not saying that's the best way to do it either. I'd still say that they should be incentivized on the bigger picture. That would cause the team to work together. The SDRs to work closely with the AEs and continue to tighten up their messaging and so on, and tie it all to the group win.

Dane Groeneveld: I like it. To be honest.

Shawn Sease: There's not a right answer there because I'm going to get positioned against somebody who is process, process, process, and we're going to argue all day about it and we have to figure out how to shake hands and find some common ground.

Dane Groeneveld: I really appreciate the view.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. It's a strategy thing there because we've had that problem doing third party outbound where we've set meetings for people and then when we find out that they can't do whatever it is... They can't do good discovery. They don't know whatever it is. I'm not pointing the finger at them. Basically, when it turns out that the answer was these people were not ready to buy, it's very vague, is extremely vague, and we go listen to the calls and find out that the AEs were showing up to the meeting and saying, " What can I do for you? How can I help you?" And then the prospects are going, " Hold on, man. Hold on. You reached out to us to book a meeting with us to learn more about you guys. I'm confused. I don't even know why I'm here. I don't know why I'm here. Why am I here?"

Dane Groeneveld: I've been on a few of those calls.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. And you certainly can't hold the SDR to compensation for that kind of show at a discovery. Something's wrong with the alignment that the AE didn't realize that this was an introductory call to see what we could shake out of the trees to see if we had an opportunity. There's a fork in the road here, disqualified out or accepted into the pipeline. Again, if we're talking about outbound at the 10, 000K plus, there's a cycle here. There's a sequence of events that needs to take place, and that's all getting cluttered because everyone's trying to build these super precise lists, intent data, jump out from behind a bush and throw a net on them and drag them in. But all of the automation continues to drive us that way. The automation is driving us that way to believe that that's actually the case and it's not.

Dane Groeneveld: No, I think you're absolutely right. And I actually like your take on it personally. Like you say, it's not going to work for everyone, but being the future of teamwork, building compensation around team goals rather than breaking it down into this overspecialized, hey, just you do your part and only worry about yourself. I think it drives more learning. Hopefully it helps teams push through some of those challenges you've shared. I can't believe we've already knocked out 46 minutes. I've got a few takeaways to summarize and share. I love the way you talk about not being too precise, not over provisioning for the work that needs to be done. I've certainly felt that in my sales teams over the time. The tech stack Tetris, I think we could have spent the whole time talking about that. That was a big one. The human connection, particularly with AI and chatbots and auto dialers, I still think it's hugely underplayed and I think it plays out nicely in small teams, so I appreciate you shining a light on that. And then finally talking about... And I'm going to say his name wrong. Anthony Iannarino, I think. And his four levels of selling. That selling as part of the strategic future. If nothing else, for teams, particularly sales teams, that's an exciting reason to turn up to work every day. If you're selling to help your customer drive their strategic initiative, strategic future, then that's a really unique opportunity.

Shawn Sease: Well, I think what you just said there that salespeople who want to get up and excited about their work are a special kind of people, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, they are.

Shawn Sease: I think that's really the super important part. That you're actually doing things to get to that point, to get to the point to where you feel like in the morning, I'm excited to do the work, I'm excited to be a salesperson. I think it takes a lot of guts. It takes a lot of guts to actually say things like, we either do this together or we don't do it at all. There's even a book, a sales book called that. And what's interesting about that theme is it's not like, hey, be nice. Be nice and do this with me and we'll get along great. It's more like if we don't do it together, we can't do it. My hands are tied. I cannot help you if we're not going to do it together. And that's what always worries me about this idea, the marketing idea that buyers are 67% down the road before they intersect with a salesperson. Well, to me, that's if a prospect is doing it on their own, but as a salesperson for a particular market, for something that we're trying to penetrate a goal we have, there's people out there that do not know that I exist and don't know how I work or operate or how I could help them. I need to go out and introduce myself to those people and get in those conversations. Because it's like the RFP process. You know darn well, if you've ever done government RFPs or large RFPs, if you've done it for a few years and you've won a few, it doesn't take you long to realize the game or for a procurement person to tell you like, " Hey, all things being equal, we like you, but you're a little late here. We're partners with these guys over here." Reading between the lines, that partner wrote the RFP and locked out everybody, right? Why?

Dane Groeneveld: They did. Cuddling.

Shawn Sease: They were there first. They were first. They were the incumbent. But those two things are important. If you're the incumbent, then you have to stay on top of it, and if you're not the incumbent, that's your opportunity, that you're not the incumbent, that you've got to go uproot somebody, and that's not going to be pains and problems. That's going to be someone going, " At the end of the day, we like your style. We're going to share some secrets with you. Let's go ahead and do this now." And that's really what's going on.

Dane Groeneveld: It is. I actually like the way those two things tie together too. You've got to be there first if you're going to be in the RFP process because otherwise you're just making up the numbers.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. Well, then that's what I mean. That concept that they came up with that said that they're 67% down the road, so you need all these tools to do content and dah, dah, dah, dah, so be there, meet them where they are. It's like, well, no, just go find out where they are and start hanging out there or go say hi and have them be uncomfortable and say, " I don't know you. What do you want? This is weird." Yeah, of course it is. That's how you get to know somebody.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that, Shawn. And you also shine a light on a really cool statement for the future of teamwork, which is if we don't do it together, we don't do it. I think that's a great ending note.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. So let's do it together or not at all. I swear for what that actually means. If we don't, if you're pretending, if you're not telling the truth, then why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? Yeah. And tell me the truth. We leave it on that. I always say there's two kinds of objections. There's what sounds good and the truth. And I would say just to use some kind of number, with some kind of number that probably as salespeople and cold callers, we probably get what sounds good. Let's make it dramatic. 90% of the time. And we get the true 10% of the time.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's science.

Shawn Sease: Yeah. The objection handling is such a weird thing because people are telling you what sounds good. I'm going to a meeting. You interrupted me at a bad time. That's another one of my fundamental things like before we objection handle, have we gotten to the point where we're having a two way conversation? Are they telling us the truth or are they telling us what sounds good? It's a milestone. You got to get past what sounds good.

Dane Groeneveld: It is. It is. Which is why I love selling and I love working with sales teams. It's fun. There's so much challenge in it, and I appreciate all the work you're doing out there. How do our listeners, if they want to get some support from your team at iNeverAnswer. com, how do they find you?

Shawn Sease: Yeah. If you visit, iNeverAnswer.com, there's a big book a meeting up there. Then I'm Shawn Sease on LinkedIn. I'm all over there. You guys can connect with me over there. Everything that I sell or provide as a service, I always am giving out for free through Google Sheets or all of it's on LinkedIn. I constantly just every day just dump what's on my mind.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. That's how I found you, on LinkedIn. I enjoyed the content. So thanks for taking the time to share the story and the insights. Shawn, I really enjoyed it.

Shawn Sease: My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Dane, and everybody else. Cheers everyone. Good luck.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition, and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to thefutureofteamwork. com. There, you can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build the future of teamwork. Until next time.