Sales is really a craft. It’s not black magic. It’s not an art. You’re not born to do it. It’s like a lot of things. When you start doing it, you’re not going to be very good at it. But, you know, with some discipline and some time and some practice, you can get good at it.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped hundreds of growing businesses build scalable systems on the HubSpot and Salesforce platforms. To learn more, visit fastslowmotion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghy, and today I’m delighted to be joined by Barry Thomason.

Barry is an exceptional sales advisor who works with founders and early stage growth companies. He’s made a significant impact in the fields of sales and marketing throughout his career, and currently holds the position of Entrepreneur in Residence at the New Venture Accelerator and the Harvard College of Business at Auburn University. And Barry is no stranger to us here at Fast Slow Motion because he played a pivotal role in helping to build the company for eight and a half years.

And he’s since retired in December 2022. So, Barry, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you here. Thank you. Sam. It’s really good to be back with the Fast Slow Motion team and looking forward to the conversation today. Awesome. Hey, Barry, would you mind kicking us off by giving us a brief overview of your career and also how it’s led you to becoming an expert advisor for founders and early stage growth businesses?

Yeah, it’s my career is pretty simple. I’m essentially a salesman. It’s all I’ve ever been, I worked for six different companies over 38 years. All of them in some form of the I.T. space. Professional services, hardware, application software, large scale mainframe systems. I’ve done a little bit of all of it over those years. The common thread, though, is really two things.

Constant change, uncertainty and chaos. But, six of the companies I work for were either startups or small growth businesses, and they’re just chaotic by nature. Another company I worked for was a very large old company that was undergoing some dramatic change. And so it was, a lot of chaos in that as well. And what I found along the way is, is that’s actually what I like, chaotic or kind of squishy, undefined situation and clean it up and get it kind of systematically working.

And then I’m going to go on to the next place. That’s probably why I’ve worked at six different places and maybe inside those six places probably had 12 or 15 different jobs, all sales related. But that pretty much sums it up because I was always selling something and usually it was pretty early stage or something new, a new product rollout or something like that.

I’d love to, to find out, you know, if you can share any key milestones or experiences that that have shaped your expertise or understanding of sales. Yeah. You know, when I started off like a lot of people of my generation. So I started off in 1985 and I was working for a little company that sold. They were personal computer components, interface boards and peripherals and things like that, basically commodity type items.

And I was given a telephone, a list of companies and product catalog and told it go get some business. You know, a lot of smile and as they say, and you just try to get in front of people and know what you have and what it cost. And if you can deliver it, they might buy.

And it was a lot of that kind of repetition and moved along into, into selling more, complex type systems and solutions. I figured out that I needed to make myself relevant in the conversation to that prospect, and I needed to, you know, if you’re going to ask somebody to commit millions of dollars and a lot of time and take a lot of risk, you know, kind of figured out, hey, I got to figure out ways to make myself a resource to my prospects and to be an asset and not an adversary.

And many times, unfortunately, salespeople think that their prospects are their adversaries, and their prospects think that the sales rep is their adversary. And that’s just not the way it’s supposed to work. It works like that all too often. Do you remember the early days of when you started out? Did you did you get training? I mean, did you have decent training early on?

No. Yeah, it was a small company, but there were helpful people around. But I had to ask, but, other than to, other than to be told what our products were, and, you know, here’s your site. You look them up in the price book. That was about it. So why do you think that is something that goes on in sales organizations or sales divisions.

There’s a lack of training and people just come in and they, you know, they’re expected to sort of, you know, sink or swim. Yeah. I think it’s better now, larger companies in particular do a better job, small and more mid-sized companies, maybe not as much. what they’ll do is try to hire somebody with some experience.

And part of that, I think, is because they don’t know how to train a sales rep, other than to, say, go find some prospects, ask a few questions. If you’ve got products, do a demonstration or presentation, make a proposal and close the deal. And, you know, just go out and do that and do that over and over and over again and, play the numbers game.

Yeah. And that’s, you know, that kind of spray and pray type methodology. I mean, it’s it’s widely done, but it’s not very effective if you can survive at it, but it’s not very effective. You chew up a lot of bodies doing it. That’s right. Yeah. There’s a huge amount of people that give up early on, right In sales.

It’s a very, very difficult, thing to master. It can be, but if you put it in the right context, it’s a lot easier. I’ve found over the years. And I learned a lot about this by working in, a couple of professional services firms where if you’re selling a professional service firm like Fast Slow Motion, some or all of the professional staff has to be engaged in the sales process at some point.

You know, they’re mostly technical people, some introverted, some just plain shy. Nobody told them at school like, oh, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta be involved in this and we don’t want to because sales is, it’s kind of a dirty job and we don’t really know what salespeople do. It’s magic. And we don’t have the we don’t have the magic.

We don’t have the gene or whatever. And, so we don’t really want to be involved in any of that. And so, you know, what I did over the years was it’s both for myself and, and, you know, you know, working with, with like, I.T. professionals in particular is kind of break it down to okay, sales is really a craft.

It’s not it’s not black magic. It’s not an art. You’re not born to do it. It’s it’s like a lot of things when you start doing it, you’re not going to be very good at it. But you know, with some discipline and some time and some practice, you can get good at it. And so what I, what I did is kind of put made a little framework of sales

is really a service. It’s a service job. Right. If you if you think about retail sales, you know, if somebody walks into a retail shop and the little bell rings at the door, the sales staff will look up and say, may I help you? Right. That’s what sales is the person walking in the door because they’re walking in and they’re indicating maybe they’re a buyer.

And your job is the seller is to help the buyer. And so I found by using that context, okay, your job is not to manipulate your prospect and pull some kind of fast one on them or get them to do something they shouldn’t do. Your job is to help them. They’re trying to evaluate an idea, solve a problem, figure out, you know, what or how to do something in your job is to kind of help them through their process.

Because what I learned over the years is, whether you believe it or not, you might be doing all this sales stuff over here, the buyers doing a lot of buying stuff over here, and they’re going to do they’re going to do their stuff with or without you. So you need to get on. You need to get on board with them and serve them.

And then the deal will move along. And then and when you do that, like in a Fast Slow Motion context, you’re bringing in the professional staff. When they’re looking at it that way, they’re like, okay, this is not dirty. We’re not here to get pull something off on our on our prospect. We’re here to help this person. And sometimes we help them by saying, you know what?

We can’t help you. We’re not the right guy you need to try something else. Or maybe you you maybe need to not do what you’re contemplating do, even though that’s going to cost us money because you’re not ready to do it. That’s that’s the job is to if you help the buyer, you’ll make sales. Yeah. And I think that, a lot of sales organizations, you know, you do get tarred with that bad brush, right?

Because not all sales organizations are created equal. Right? You know, you mentioned that some organizations are happy to lose the sale because they’re selling to the customer, whereas there are some sales reps out there that have been told, you don’t lose the sale, right. But you get the sale by any means. And I think that’s maybe where the negative, the negative spin on sales folks comes into play.

Yeah. I mean, it’s when you tell somebody your life depends on going to close a deal and you don’t really give them anything else to work with but that, you know, humans have built in survival instincts. Don’t go out there and survive, and they’ll drag a bunch of deals into your company that you couldn’t afford to have. And, you know, those kind of organizations, they may have good numbers on top line, but they got a lot of dissatisfied staff.

They got a lot of unhappy customers It’s, you know, to me, it’s like the very first time a prospective customer interacts with a business. It’s usually through the sales team, and it’s usually not. It’s usually not to handle money. It’s usually some kind of inquiry. If you’re looking for information and you’re and you’re providing them service. So the, you know, for a long time, the first time anybody got any service from Fast Slow Motion, they got it from me because that was my job.

Right. As the inquiry came, me and I was the person to answer it. And that needed to be a, you know, a quality service encounter. Not not me saying, hey, Sam, thanks for calling. Send me $8,000 and we’ll start tomorrow. Right. So how do we how do we give, salespeople the power and the autonomy to be able to act in that way?

Where does that stem from? Well, it comes from the top. obviously it comes from the top. And part of that is, is, you know, when you go to set up, your sales team is like, okay, you know, first thing is you go for our sales team, we expect you to be a service provider and recruit to that.

Yeah. You want people that are motivated and self-starters and all those other things you’ve recruited salespeople, you know, you know, kind of the profile, right. But it’s how do you want to apply that. And so if you set the context to context from the outset of you as a seller, here, you’re going to close deals, but you’re closed deals because you helped our buyers.

And so you got to you got to roll from the top down with that. And it’s got to and part of that has to be, you know, part of your job is, is to protect this business. Our business, from deals that we don’t need to be in. I remember, our, Chief Growth Eric Housh, mentioning that our sales reps typically sleep well at night, right, because we’re actually doing a service for our customers, and we get on with our customers because they’re genuinely like us.

you know, I think that’s a good spot to be in from a sales perspective. I know I’ve always that’s always where I wanted to be. I didn’t I never wanted to be, you know, I don’t want my prospects to roll their eyes when they see my phone number in the, in their caller ID. They all got what to say.

Well, it must be the end of the quarter, right? You know, again, I wanted to be a resource. I wanted to, you know, I want them to want to pick up the phone because, hey, this this guy helps. Barry you know, I mean, I can see why businesses tend to go for the typical candidate that you might look for in a sales role.

You know, somebody that’s really confident, you know, they’re extroverted, they’ve got a natural gift for making conversation. And they sort of project that assertiveness that you you generally need to be successful. But why is this potentially a mistake in your opinion, to hire to that sort of, profile? You know, that is probably part of the profile you need.

It’s just not all right. It’s you want to add that you want to add that service component. There used to be a company and I won’t name on. They’ve been bought out of the very, very large, you know, they were like fortune 500 I.T. company and they only hired ex college athletes because they wanted the hyper competitive when it all cost.

That was their sales culture and, and it worked for them. But, you know, again, I want people that they’re going to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. And I don’t, you know, I don’t want to use the Spurs. I want to use the reins on occasion. But, but I want to I want it used in the right way.

And that way is, is okay, let’s help. Let’s help our prospects get where they need to be. So you mentioned the reins, right? As opposed to the Spurs. What are the reins? Those are the processes the sales processes and the systems that you build on the sales team. Yeah that’s a good way to look at it.

Is it. You know you got to have you got to have some ways to, you know, just have some checks and balances. I want you to get out there and get after it, but don’t get ahead of your blocking. So, you know, like in a Fast Slow Motion context. Even though, you know, we used to do things I probably still do like, CRM Quickstarts that are well defined, kind of prepackaged services.

You wouldn’t want me to go out, sign a contract for one of those without having, done some discovery with the prospect. Right. So even even if and, you know, we’ve had situations like that before where, some of our partner reps say, just just send the statement of work, they’ll sign it. Well, like, we, you know, no, we got to slow this down.

We have to talk to him first, make sure we’re a good fit and we understand what they wanted to do. And those kind of things. And you have processes in place to keep all that in check. But, But I’d much rather do that. Didn’t have to tell you that. Hey, get busy and let’s get out there and get some work.

Is there a balance between that as well? Because I’ve heard that saying right, time kills deals. But I also appreciate what you’re saying. Slow it down so you don’t you don’t mess this process up. Right. You’ve got to you’ve got to adhere to a good process. What’s the balance there? Yeah, I guess time could kill deals. But a lot of times in deals, the seller is always more anxious than the buyer or almost always.

And, how anxious you are as a seller doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference to the buyer. And so if, if you’re being if you’ll be in alignment with the buyer, you won’t have any problems with that because again, they’re they’re doing things that they need to do to advance the deal, either either inside their own head or with their team trying to get their people all in agreement and align, or they’ve just got internal process their waiting on.

And, you know, I can jump up and down and do whatever I want to do to try to push it along, but sometimes I can’t. So you map the sales efforts to the buyer journey is what you said. Absolutely. Tell me more about that then what? Can you unpack that for me? Because I’m really interested in hearing more about that.

You know, I don’t know if, people don’t stop and and think about this, but there’s there’s two parties to every sales transaction, right? There’s the selling party, there’s the buying party. And if you don’t have the buying party, the selling party, you’re wasting your time, right? You can you can be out there doing sales things. You can be talking to people.

You’ve been having meetings, you be offering proposals and doing presentations. But if you if the buyer is not in the right place to be receiving that, you know, you’re kind of wasting your time. So, you know, again, a lot of a lot of companies will say, you know, we’ll get we’re going to hire some folks and, we just want to get out there and tell our story and close business.

You have to remember. Yeah, you got to go out and tell the company story, but you got to tell it. And there’s a context where that’s done and that’s the buyer’s. It’s often called the buyer’s journey. because if you think about it, and this is another thing that’s interesting to me is people fail to recognize that the behavior of a buyer shouldn’t be a mystery to anybody, because we all do it.

We we we have a buying process, if you will, that we use in our personal lives when we’re making, complicated purchases and also even when you’re like, evaluate the political idea or something, there’s there’s a kind of some mental I think, of the more questions that you go through to get to, okay, I want to do this and I want to do this thing with this other company.

Right. And so it kind of starts off, if you go into the market as a seller and you, you know, first person you encounter, you know, you might launch into your whole elevator pitch or whatever. But what are they doing? They’re sitting there going, who is this guy? Who’s this company? Do I care? Do I need to care?

You’re right. There’s there’s there’s you’re out here spinning your wheels and they’re spinning there, and they’re probably not, not very good sync. Right. But if you can somehow get their attention, get a little engagement, then they’re thinking if they decide, well, maybe I should care, then, you know, they’ll move it, they’ll move it to the next stage, which is okay.

Well that’s interesting. I wonder I wonder if that might apply to me. I wonder if it does apply to me, wonder if I could afford it, or if it would take a long time to to install it or make it work or, you know, have an implementation, whatever you know, they’re going to start, they’ll start asking some more questions, right?

If they satisfy themselves that, yeah, this is this is worthwhile, then they might go to a kind of a mental stage of, well, what if anybody else does this, this, you know, met these people and they sound pretty good and it seems like something ought to consider, but, you know, might be able to check, see if there’s somebody better, different, whatever.

If they move through that and they’re like, okay, well I got a couple options here. Let’s, you know, let’s trade them off. Let’s see, you know, company A and company B features capabilities, risk, all those things cost. Right. Let’s let me boil all this down so I can pick one of them right through that. And then they’ll go through a little okay I’m going to really going to do this.

Can I do it. Can the company can the company deliver on their promises. And can I hold up my end of the bargain? And if I get through all that, then you’ll close a deal. So so again, if you approach that person, they’re going to do those things, whether you’re involved or not. Right. So the whole idea of of alignment is just that okay, recognize that they’re going to go through those middle stages.

And when you when you connect with them you got to figure out, okay, where are they. Did you mesh what you’re doing with what they’re doing right. If if they’re still at a stage, what I call deciding to decide. So they don’t know if they really want to go forward or not. But the kind of I think this is an interesting idea.

Well, then what you do as a seller is different than if they’re down there trying to evaluate you versus a competitor. Right. And so misalignment is when you’re doing the things you should be doing to distinguish yourself against a competitor with somebody who’s nowhere near that in their process. So it’s really, really that. So and I’m assuming we’re talking about outbound sales at this point or does this work for inbound as well.

Yeah. The the the medium doesn’t really matter that much. Right. This is but this is more, you know, more complex sales if you will, who’s going to be more than one decision maker involved. And usually and with products and services where this mostly applies, there’s no inherent value in in what’s being exchanged. The value you get is derived after you use it or deploy it or consume the service.

So it’s more of that kind of sale. It’s not. So that’s so much applicable to, you know, I need a new Dell laptop. Just go get a new Dell laptop. Right? Commodity? Well, Barry, you’ve given us so much wisdom in our conversation so far. For our listeners, we hope that you’ll join us for part two with Barry on how sales is such a huge service opportunity.

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