Jim Speredelozzi, VP Sales, The Predictive Index

• Sales might be the only profession where people commonly have the “this is how I fell into sales story”
• College roommate had a father in sales. Roommate said he was going to be in sales too…..why would you even go to college?
• Finished college with Liberal Arts degree but no liberal arts jobs
• Didn’t think he would be a fit for sales, but he was a nerd and passionate about computers so it seemed to work out
• Sociology stigma in sales and he had it but thinks it is changing - colleges starting to teach sales, guest lecture at MIT & Harvard & Bentley
• Helping people make a positive change is how the best salespeople operate
• The best sellers and sales leaders instill a belief system FIRST, before they focus on the tactics 
• Assumptive close….probably not the best
• Your Belief system is the most important part of sales - ATTITUDE
• Sandler- Success Triangles 
• If you do not believe you’re there to help people, you will not be successful in the long-term
• Shouldn’t sell to people that you can’t HELP
• Make the world better through Better work! Make people’s life at work more enjoyable, be more engaged at work
• More engaged at work = happier employees = happier relationships at home = better world
• 90%+ of revenue comes from a partner network of business consultants
• PI Tools & Talent Optimization platform to enable those changes - But first WHAT IS THE PROBLEM THAT NEEDS FIXING?
• PI Reference Profile - Captain - Proactive, task orientation, assertive, extroverted - good for sales - flexible but enjoys process too
• PI founded in 1959
• Collaborators - ME- help teams be cohesive, get everyone to feel good, useful when you have a toxic culture because they help the teams gel, long-term affiliations, patience, struggle to deal with transactional sales role, enterprise sales
• Anybody can do any job.  Question is what is NATURAL for them? It’s more WORK for someone to do some of those other things, like me to do a transactional sale
• Find something that aligns well with your innate behavioral needs
• Sales hiring - I don’t want to build a Sales Team- I want to build a team of leaders and a LEADERSHIP Development function. They could be used internally or expand outside of the organization
• @BlackDuck if people hate it and don’t want to be a part of it and you only hire them based upon sales experience. So people quit and you’re set-back
• ⅔ of the sales people he hired quit within a 3 month period - looked to see if he could start using Behavioral Assessment - got attached to PI
• He was hiring for experience vs. looking for behavioral fit for a leadership role
• Get rid of sales experience as a qualifying factor and your pool of candidates opens massively
• Can create a great salesperson in 6 months. Hard to breakdown bad habits
• Best way to start learning how to sell is, make Cold-calls, possibly the hardest job in sales. Get a lot of looks and some of the belief systems.
• If you can’t get your attitude right, you can’t cold call effectively
• Learn to quickly establish rapport in an efficient way
• Most people don’t want to talk about sports or weather
• You can’t make a positive change with somebody if you don’t spend time talking about the business problems and challenges they are trying to solve
• How to use Empathy & Humor (self-deprecating) to build rapport
• You believe the people you’re calling you can help
• Build empathy- quickly - The Like Switch - build rapport with Russian Agents
• The Empathic Statement- quickly build rapport by showing empathy- greet someone new and Notice something about them and STATE IT…..”SO You….” “So you seem….busy, stressed, frustrated”
• Empathy = experiencing someone’s emotional state with them or at least a concern for theirs when you match tone that focuses on concern.
• Working with MBA candidates - they are not envisioning themselves in sales in an end state - they will attempt to found a company or be senior exec- they know they’re going to have to sell to be effective in so many business roles
• Lou Shipley- CEO of Black Duck - “The first thing the board asks you is how does the sales forecast look”
• How to bounce back - Extreme Ownership - Jock Willink - Cannonballs, when something bad happens- CELEBRATE IT now you can figure out how to fix it
• First thing as a sales leader when you miss a month- look at yourself and your leadership to see how YOU can be accountable to that result
• You don’t make excuses
• Don’t want to be in a position where you feel as bad as your worst month or as good as your best month
• What could I have fixed and done better? Even in a great month
• What did I do wrong?
• Mike CEO @ PI - Avid Sailor- “Let the storms show your mastery”
  • You control your ship, your team, what you do
• Office Olympics - Captains are Hyper competitive
• Behavioral interview and tailor it to the person.  If you suspect someone will be weak in an area- a question about a time when they’ve shown - Look for the emotional response, why they won/lost.
• Favorite question for sales people- Do you have any questions for me? ASK SOME QUESTIONS- At the most senior level to not seem curious or excited is a way to fail!
• Curiosity sells you, because people love to talk about themselves and their company

Links:

• Success Triangles
• The Like Switch - Jack Schaffer
• Extreme Ownership - Jocko Willink
• The Predictive Index
• Jim on LinkedIn