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inbound marketing to sales coaching
February 18, 2022

Sales Leader Interview: Inbound Marketer to Outbound Sales Coach

inbound marketing to sales coaching

I spoke with Carole Mahoney, founder of Unbound Growth, which provides science-based, field-tested training, coaching, and consulting. When Carol founded her agency, she soon realized that overly relying on inbound opportunities wasn’t going to be enough and that in order to succeed she needed to fully embrace outbound sales.

Carole shares her journey from an inbound marketer to one of the best outbound sales coaches, a fantastic journey revealing important lessons that remain extremely relevant to all sales professionals.

Read the transcript of our conversation and you’ll learn:

  • Carole’s journey from inbound marketer to outbound sales coach
  • How the sales profession can sometimes look like 19th-century medicine
  • How preconceived ideas of what sales is can affect cold call reluctance
  • The power of ‘it’s not about you’
  • How Carole works with top sales performers promoted in leadership roles
  • How time management is critical to sales leadership success
  • Why recording the sales calls your team makes is vital for improving performance

Inbound Marketer to Outbound Sales Coach

Rich: Carol Mahoney. Welcome. How are you doing?

Carole: I am doing wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Rich: It’s a real pleasure. It’s a real pleasure. You and I’ve spoken before and I know that you and I share a lot of similarities in our journey to where we are today. So, we’ll get into that in a little bit. Before we do, if you meet potential prospects, let’s say you’re at a networking event or on the phone, how do you typically describe what you do?

Carole: I typically describe what I do as helping salespeople to have better conversations that buyers actually enjoy, that help businesses to grow. Some people … Actually, a friend of mine who teaches at Harvard called me a sales therapist. This usually raises a few eyebrows because I’m definitely not a certified therapist, but may be certified.

Rich: Excellent. What are your typical clients? What do they look like? What’s the demographic? What sort of clients do you typically work with when you’re helping them in those ways?

Carole: My business model is a little bit unique in that about half of the clients that I work with are individual salespeople who come to me because they’re looking to take their career, and their craft to the next level and they’re willing to make the investment in themselves. Because they recognize that investing in their ability to further their income helps their family, helps their company, helps business, and also makes them a better person for it. About 25% of the clients that I work with are sales managers… Sometimes what happens is I work with their salespeople and their managers say, “How did you turn so and so around, I want to be able to do that for my whole team.”

Carole: So, I will coach the coach on how to coach their teams. Then I also work with leaders who are really looking to scale their companies. Typically, they’re smaller organizations, say, series A, B, or C, and they’re looking to grow their teams, but they want to do so in a way that is more based in data and science than it is in … “This is how we did it in our previous company.” One of the things that I often find myself saying to these kinds of leaders and founders is that sales is the lifeblood of your business.

Carole: If you were to walk into a doctor’s office, you would expect them to run tests and use some type of a litmus test as to what needs to happen here. That’s my approach to sales as well for them because my job is to try and take as much of the guesswork out of how to hire the right people and how to develop the right people so that they can get Predictable Revenue Growth. That’s really where my heart lies because I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. So, seeing small businesses grow, I know that creates jobs, it creates communities, and that’s really what it’s all about.

Rich: Great. So, give us a little bit of your journey to where you are today. When we first connected through Allego, I was aware that you had a background in marketing, but I think it’s useful for the listeners just to get a sense of how you came to do what you do now, and the journey that you took to arrive at where you are today.

Carole: Oh, gosh, how far back should I go? Well, as I mentioned I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, and so the perception that I got from sales was very much the … The majority of people have their perception mindset toward sales. Daniel Pink wrote in his book To Sell is Human, that nine out of 10 of us when we hear the word sales there’s some kind of a negative connotation to that. I was definitely one of those nine out of 10 people. Because when I went to school and decided to go into marketing, one of the reasons why was, I love the psychology of why people make decisions that they do in the business context, and marketing seems to be a really good fit for that.

Carole: Also, I really hated sales. Like every time a salesperson came around me, whether it was the used car salesman or the telemarketing phone call or any of those lines, I just got this kind of creepy like, they’re trying to con me, what is it that they’re not telling me they’re just not trustworthy, and I wanted nothing to do with that. I actually went into marketing and specifically internet marketing because I believed as so many people have, that the internet is going to completely obliterate the need to have salespeople. I was like, “Yes,” because nobody likes them, nobody trusts them, nobody wants to deal with them, so let’s eliminate them.

Carole: I actually started a marketing agency with the mission of helping small businesses grow, but also with the secret mission of let’s eliminate the need for salespeople. I was convinced that the internet was going to make it easy for people to buy, and that all we had to do is do this great, awesome marketing and the cash register would start ringing. What I found happening was, in my own business, because of my mindset towards sales, impacted my own business growth. I found myself at one point with clients that would nitpick over invoices, wouldn’t follow the advice that I was giving them, and sometimes wouldn’t even pay their invoices.

Carole: It was also difficult for me to bring on more clients because guess what? You can’t take marketing needs to the bank, someone still has to make that connection between the problem that they’re trying to solve and the right solution for them. So, I reached that point in my own business where I was frustrated with the customers that I had. I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to get more customers, I didn’t know how. I started reading and doing every sales book that was out there: Solution selling Baseline selling, Question- based selling, Sandler selling, jump up and down on your foot and rub your belly at one time kind of selling.

Carole: I was so frustrated again because none of it seemed to actually stick, and not only did it not stick, but it didn’t seem to resonate with the people that I was talking to. This just confirmed my belief that sales is just this pushy, manipulative, aggressive thing, and if this is what I have to do to have my business, then I’m all set. I actually seriously considered just leaving my business and taking a job that is just not in my DNA.

Carole: I was fortunate enough that a software company called HubSpot that I partnered with had created this partner program and realized that a lot of other people who own marketing agencies were struggling with the same things. Because we were drinking the Kool-Aid inbound marketing is all you need to grow your businesses except we’re finding is not working [inaudible 00:08:55] our own businesses. The other thing that I found is that not only was it not working for me, it wasn’t working for the clients that I did have. They were trying to take the same outdated models of selling and applying that to today’s customers in an inbound way, and it just wasn’t working, and because they weren’t getting sales they left.

Carole: So, here I am, I find myself now I don’t even have any clients, and I don’t know how to get more new clients, and now I’m really up the creek. So, what happened was is I started working with a coach because what I found was that I might know what it is that I need to do. I’ve read the books, I’ve done the training, but when it became time for me to do it in the moment when I was having a conversation, everything went right out the window. I was too caught up in my own head. I was afraid of rejection so I would never make cold calls.

Carole: What I learned through working with a sales coach is that it wasn’t enough to know the tactics. My mindset had to be in alignment with that in order for it to be effective. Slowly over a period of time, I started breaking down my misconceptions of what sales was really all about. One day I kind of found myself surprised that I was actually enjoying it. I was actually enjoying picking up the phone and calling people and having real conversations. I was actually enjoying the process of going out and networking and whatever it was that I needed to do to get more clients in.

Carole: I actually then found myself taking whatever I was learning about sales and offering that as advice to my clients, and they started seeing different results. At one point, I realized that if my mission is really to help small businesses to grow, and scale, it’s not always about marketing. The thing that’s missing now is that connection between marketing and sales and the customer, and that if my mission was to help them grow, then really the place where I could do that was in sales, and it’s sales coaching. Because I’m not the only one with this negative mindset about sales.

Carole: Sales is actually a noble profession because it’s the process by connecting a problem to a solution. is the process whereby two people determine value and exchange something for value to create something better. That change in mindset brought about a whole new business model, and now I today find myself doing for a lot of other entrepreneurs and salespeople and sales managers, what I learned myself in my own entrepreneurial journey.

Rich: Absolutely, Carole that story resonates with me tremendously. As somebody who used to work in marketing, I experienced many of the frustrations and struggles that you’ve alluded to there. One of the things that held me back in terms of embracing outbound sales, was a particular resistance to people selling me partly because I was being exposed to very old-fashioned stereotypical sales approaches that just didn’t resonate with me. As an inbound marketer, I was expecting the leads to come to me and not really embracing the idea that perhaps I should go out, and generate those leads and generate those sales.

Rich: So, let’s pivot from there and think about the approach that you take, how does that differ? How are you advocating and working with the clients that you work with to move away from old-fashioned methods? What’s your approach? What’s your more modern take on sales? How does it differ from historical, more traditional sales messages?

Carole: So, the reason I got into marketing was because I loved the psychology of why people buy and make the decisions that they make. What I learned about sales is that with marketing, we’re doing that from a distance. We’re trying to create content in a way that attracts people to a particular message to take action, but sales are very similar except that we’re doing it one to one in conversations with real people. That psychology and science of how we form rapport, bonds, relationships, trust, and communication – and our biases towards what we hear and what we see – fascinated me.

Carole: As I started being more and more exposed to what sales was really all about, which is helping people come to some kind of a solution, I realized that a lot of what’s happening in traditional sales is like what medicine was like in the 19th century. In the 19th century, they didn’t have science to actually perform surgeries or cure diseases. It was, “Well, this is how so and so did it, and I follow so and so’s teachings and so that’s how I’m going to do it.” It wasn’t necessarily based on science, it was based on, “Well, so and so said, so.” Kind of like that phrase, “Well, this is how we did it in our previous company.”

Carole: Or if you really think about it, we all nine out of 10 of us have this negative perception of sales and our perceptions of things will impact our behaviors towards that thing. So, if you have a negative perception of sales, and you’re being forced into sales, either because you’re an entrepreneur or you’re a kid right out of college, looking for your first job unless you’re shown actually how people process information and how to ask those questions you’re going to default to whatever model of behavior you know. Which is that cheesy, pushy, aggressive, manipulative salesperson. Because, well, that’s what salespeople should do.

Carole: I actually saw this happen right in front of my eyes when I was coaching Harvard Business School entrepreneurial MBA students. They asked me to come in and coach the students on as role play that they were doing, and they videotaped the role play. Prior to going into the role-play of the mock situation, the two students were on the video and having just an everyday casual conversation, talking about various things. Then it became time to do role play, and it was like the two people had suddenly put on costumes and masks and become totally different people because they entered into a sales situation. The person who was supposed to be the salesperson started talking really fast, never asking questions, and it was just a pitch for like two or three minutes and at the end of it, the other person was like … Then they went into a price negotiation.

Carole: This is how we hear a lot of sales calls go. It’s amazing to watch that transformation happen to people. As soon as they enter into anything that they have to do with sales, their whole demeanor changes because they’re modeling the behavior of what they think a salesperson should do, which is those sleazy, slimy tactics. So, we become the very thing that we disdain. So, the approach that I take is trying to break those mindsets of what sales actually is, and using science and psychology to do that. Just like they did with medicine in the 19th century.

Carole: Medicine and being a doctor weren’t seen as being noble. You were seen as a barbarian and a charlatan or a religious fanatic, but when they started doing dissection and science and really understanding how the human body worked, the results started to change as a result of that, the whole mindset and perception towards medicine changed, and it became the respected profession that it is today. That’s my approach to sales because I believe that if we use and leveraged science and data and sound scientific principles to train and coach salespeople, we can train and coach them to do that. They are actually people that buyers want to interact with.

Rich: So, then if we think about, in particular, how this might apply to say, a topic that I know is, is front and center for a lot of people, and that’s about cold calling reluctance, the idea that you don’t want to make the call or you’re reluctant to do it, or members of your team are reluctant to do it. How much of that do you think is born out of a preconceived notion that every time I pick up the phone, I’m going to be interrupting somebody? How do you deal with them among your coaching clients? How do you deal with a reluctance to actually make those calls?

Carole: That’s the idea of getting that cold call, almost all of us, at least people from my generation, if you’re 40 and over, you know what this is. You’re sitting down to have dinner, somebody calls and starts pitching products. “Hey, can I take five minutes of your time,” and like, “No, it’s the middle of dinnertime. No,” and you’re annoyed. My Nana was famous for every time someone would interrupt us at dinner, she would stop her feet and say, “You know what, I’m going to turn around. And I’m going to write a stern letter and give your company a piece of my mind for calling me during dinner.” That comes embedded in our brains. Like, it’s not polite to call people out of the blue unexpectedly.

Carole: What happens is that when we have to go into sales, and actually call people to start a conversation, that’s how we feel, and that’s how we come across. So, it’s first it’s a mindset because actually picking up the phone and talking to someone is something we can all do. We just don’t do it. If we do have to do it, we do it really, really badly because we’re uncomfortable with it, because of a fear of rejection. We don’t want to interrupt someone, but we really just don’t want to be rejected. We don’t want to be told that we’re annoying or that we need to go away, so we try to find excuses in ways to not have to do that.

Carole: The thing with cold calling today, is it’s the cold part of it that’s dead, not the actual call. We have so much information available to us online about how people prefer to be communicated with that when we’re making that call we can do so with some knowledge of who it is that we’re talking to. We’re not just picking a random name off of the Yellow Page and hoping and praying that we’re going to catch them at a good time. You can actually make your calls a little bit more intelligently now.

Carole: The other thing that I say to the people that I’m coaching on how to do this is, is just simply how to find a way to have fun with it. Sometimes, and actually, a lot of times the way that I actually start coaching … and this is something … We’re at the beginning of the year, it’s January, one of the best things that a sales leader, a sales manager, or a salesperson can do is identify what is personally meaningful stretch goals are. If we can find out what that is and tap into it, why do we want this success so badly? What does it mean for us in our lives? Whether that’s because we want to have a certain lifestyle or prove that we can do something or master our craft, identifying what that is what is going to propel and motivate us to do the things that we’re not necessarily comfortable with, like cold calling or warm calling, let’s call it warm calling.

Carole: One of the things that I’m working with on salespeople is their fear of rejection. One of the ways to get over your fear of rejection is to become aware of the fact that it’s really not about you. It’s one of my … It’s like the tagline for my company because I say it to salespeople all the time. It’s not about your product. It’s not about your service. It’s not about you. If you believe that, it frees you up from being afraid of that rejection when you make cold calls. It also makes you focus more on the other person in the conversation and find out more about them rather than your products and services.

Carole: The other thing of it is this: I sometimes will challenge salespeople and sales leaders to say, if you believe that you have a solution that’s compelling to someone’s problem, and you don’t make a proactive effort to find those people who have that problem, it’s kind of like the equivalent of walking down the street and seeing someone who just fell and broke their leg and walking by them without saying a word because you’re waiting for them to ask for your help. So, I say to them, are you the kind of person who’s going to walk by someone who you think might need your help, and not say or do anything until they raise their hand, say, “Hey, can you help me?” Or are you the kind of person that’s going to drop whatever you’re doing and carrying and go over to that person?

Carole: That’s what calling is about. It’s not just waiting for people to come to you and say, Hey, I have this exact problem and you have my exact solution, but actually reaching out to those people you think might have this problem, find out if they do have this problem, find out if it’s something important enough to them to solve, and working out a way to do that. It’s taking and being proactive about something you believe in.

Rich: That is useful advice that I wish I could have given to myself five, 10 years ago. Because as an inbound marketer, I was walking past a lot of people even though I knew that they needed assistance and I think that’s really valuable advice. That really resonates with me. Let’s pivot for a second Carole, I’m curious, especially in your role as somebody who coaches people who are themselves responsible for coaching others, how do you typically work with somebody who’s been promoted into a senior sales management position because of their own great performance typically, but maybe they lack the skills, the knowledge, the expertise to coach others around them? Do you work with those types of people? If so, what are some of the problems that you encounter, and some of the advice that you give to people in those situations?

Carole: Sales managers have the toughest jobs, I think of any other sales position. Especially those that have gone from, say, top rep to sales manager, because … Science calls this the Dunning Kruger effect. When you’re a new salesperson, the Dunning Kruger effect is what … Psychologists actually call Mount Stupid, and people who live on the top of Mount Stupid are completely clueless and inexperienced, but totally confident in their ability to do something.

Carole: That’s how we learn because then we make mistakes and we realize we are clueless and we start to learn. But the problem is, that when you then become a sales manager and you figure these things out that same Dunning Kruger effect also impacts you because you can’t understand why someone else can’t figure out how to do something. Because it’s easy for you now. You forget what it was like when you didn’t know. That’s the challenge that managers have. They sometimes will go into a new management position, and they’ll tell their salespeople what to do, this is how I did it, this is how you need to do it. It doesn’t work for them. One, because maybe they don’t have the skills and strengths to actually execute it. Maybe they have their own head trash in their fear of rejection, or their need for approval, or there is too emotionally involved in the outcome of this to be able to be clear about what needs to happen.

Carole: So, managers struggle with; how do I get them? Why don’t they get it? What do I need to do? So, sometimes the first thing I need to do is help that manager to shift their mindset from individual contributor where it’s about you and your quota to sales manager where it has nothing to do with you and your quota, it has everything to do with everyone else on your team. This is where the node about me mindset is most important. Because it is taking a shift from managing my time to my time is now for everybody else. That’s the first thing is a mindset shift.

Carole: The second thing that I find most new managers are struggling with is time management because they’re being pulled in so many different directions. In so many cases … I think there was a study by the sales management association that showed only one in 10 companies are actually training their managers on how to be sales managers, which means they’re being left to figure it out on their own. I’ve actually even found that most companies will invest more money in training and coaching their salespeople than they will their sales managers. So, they’re left to try and figure it out. A lot of times they do the same thing that we would do as a salesperson is, well, this is how my manager did it before, so I’m going to do the same things that they did. So, we keep perpetuating these same kinds of bad behaviors where we’re telling them what to do, we’re not actually doing coaching, we’re just telling them what to do.

Carole: So, time management becomes a real struggle. A lot of times I’m working with sales managers on how to block their time. I typically would tell a manager that 50% of your time needs to be spent in coaching because that is the only thing that’s going to be able to actually impact your team’s ability to reach quota, and actually break through quota. It’s not the reports, it’s not the spreadsheets, it’s not the meetings that you have, all of those things are a very, very small percentage of what’s actually going to make up your job, the more time that they can spend one on one in coaching their salespeople, is going to be more likely for them to see success.

Carole: Obviously, call recording is one of those things, reviewing their emails and helping them to do those, role playing conversations that helped them practice before they go into a conversation, debriefing opportunities and starting with the outcome, and working your way backward to figure out why that happened. Instead of telling them what to do, ask them what is it that you would normally do next. If it’s not something that’s going to be effective, practice a new way to do it with them.

Carole: A lot of times when I’m talking with managers, that is the biggest struggle for them right there is how do I block out my time for coaching, and what does that look like. There’s actually a webinar that I can give you for a link later on where I actually walk through in 30 minutes, how is it that a manager should structure their time, and what is that need to look like? Like, how do you run a coaching call? How do you run a debriefing? How do you run a lunch and learn training, so that is going to be effective for your time, and it’s going to actually be the thing that impacts quota for your team?

Rich: I think that’s fantastic advice. From my experience, that is such a big issue, the expectation that once a person is promoted into a senior sales position, they, therefore, are sort of imbued with all of the capabilities and skills needed to get the best out of their team as opposed to knowing that those individuals will need investment time and support to grow into that role. I think that’s hugely valuable.

Carole: Yes. I think leaders tend to have this belief that they should know what to do, but where would they learn that? They don’t teach it in college, they just started teaching it at Harvard a few years ago, for crying out loud. So it’s not like you can get a degree in sales management, it’s going to teach you even the basics of what you need to do. Then only one in 10 companies are actually making that investment. By the way, those one in 10 companies that are making the investment, are the companies that are actually seeing the revenue attainment versus the ones that aren’t.

Carole: So, this misconception that salespeople should know what to do, and sales managers should know what to do, ask yourself, well, where would they learn that? Again, sales is the lifeblood of your business, why would you not invest in that?

Rich: Absolutely. From your perspective, how important do you think it is for coaches regardless of how experienced they are? How important is it for the recording and playback of calls to feature in that coaching conversation?

Carole: There is the psychological principle in the way we learn, that’s called Active and Passive Recall. Passive and Active recall, depending on how you’re coaching someone can either be a benefit or can be not a benefit. What it says is that depending on … So say, someone, asks you to recount a conversation that you had. A lot of times what happens is that when we’re recounting that conversation, if we’re not doing it immediately afterward, then we tend to, let’s say, get fuzzy on the details. So, the sooner that you can ask a salesperson to recall a conversation, and debrief that, they’re more likely to remember that as it actually happened.

Carole: The other part about Active and Passive Recall is that it also says that when you are recalling something, the more times you recall it, the more accurate. Or actually, the more times that you recall it depends on when it is determining how accurate it is going to be. So, the role that call recording can play is helping in that Active and Passive Recall. Performers, stage performers, when they want to improve their performance, one of the first things that they do is watch their own performances. They’re looking for and finding those places where, “Okay, here’s where the audience really responded well to this particular bit, I’m going to make sure I do more of that,” or “This particular bit doesn’t sound like it landed very well. I’m going to change that up a little bit.”

Carole: So, one of the things that I actually teach sales managers, and when I tell them this their eyes get big like they just got a great big present at Christmas is, it’s not always the manager’s job to listen to every single call that their salesperson has in order to be able to coach them. It’s actually more important for the salesperson to listen to their own calls, and to pinpoint those places where they feel this went really well, I want to do more of that. This didn’t seem to land very well, I don’t know, why can you coach me through that. That’s going to have a bigger impact than a manager who listens to the calls and says, “Here’s where I think you messed up. Here’s where I think he did really well.”

Carole: Because one, the salesperson is opting into that coaching, and two they’re becoming more self-aware of themselves. Now, that’s not to say that a sales manager shouldn’t be listening to their calls, because not every salesperson is going to listen to their own calls. So, identifying that one … Doing one call a week and in that call identifying one place to coach and practice to verses 15 is going to be the best way for them to be able to recall that. Role-playing it based on or issuing a challenge that’s something that happened specific to that call, it activates our learning because it’s clickable to our real world.

Carole: One of the reasons that salespeople hate doing role plays is because it’s not real. It’s a fake customer, it’s a fake situation. I may or may not come up against it exactly like this, but if you do a role play based on something that happened in an actual call, and it relates to the real world, and you’re practicing something they need to do next, it’s going to be more likely to stick for them. So, have your salespeople listen to their own calls, and identify places where they want coaching, that’s a huge time saver and is a huge boost to being able to be aware of what’s going on.

Carole: Then again, when you are listening to calls, listen for one thing to coach too. When you’re first doing it, I can promise you that it’s the first third of the call where you’re going to find something to coach to, that will impact the rest of that call. When I have, 15 clients that I’m coaching and I don’t have time to listen to every call and all of it, I want to first start with them listen to the first half of that call, and find where is it something in this first half of the call that we can do something different that’s going to impact the rest of the call because the call starts the moment you start the call. The moment you open your mouth and say hello.

Carole: So, if you can get that part as right as possible. The rest of it will go a lot more smoothly. Which is another point too, is that when you’re looking at which opportunities do I coach to, start with the earliest ones in the pipeline because that’s where you’re going to be able to have the most impact before it’s gone so far down the road that it’s a little bit harder to change anything that’s happened.

Rich: What advice then would you give to organizations or individuals where they’re not currently listening or even recording calls in the first place? How pivotal do you think it is that they actually at an organizational level commit to the recording and playback of calls?

Carole: It depends on how fast you want results. If you don’t need results right away, then you don’t need call recording, but if you need results yesterday, you can’t afford not to do the call recording piece because it just accelerates the learning so much faster. If for example, though, maybe you’re a startup you do need results right now, maybe you can’t afford a call recording software because I suppose that happens, then what I would recommend for them is to employ that active recall and meet with your salesperson regularly and have them debrief conversations.

Carole: Even sometimes right after they happen, because the sooner that you can get them to recall it, and recall it more often, the more likely it’s going to be accurate and push back. Don’t accept everything that they say as to how it happened. Because if you’re not pushing back and challenging them and peeling that devil’s advocate, then it’s going to be hard for … You’re just going to believe what they say because, well, you probably want to believe what they say because you want that deal to close. So looking for; why might this go wrong? Who could say no? Why might they say no? Ultimately, why would they buy from us? If your salesperson can answer those questions, then it’s unlikely that deal is going to close.

Rich: So last question for me then, before we wrap up, what’s the one business book that has had the greatest impact on you and why?

Carole: Oh, my goodness. Just one that’s hard.

Rich: I’ll give you two.

Carole: Okay. Give me two. So my … It’s still hard. I’m going to go with my first because, in therapy, it’s either the most recent or the most traumatic. So, the first book that ever had a huge impact on me, actually wasn’t a sales book it was a book called, “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark” which was written by Jeffrey and Brian Eisenberg. At the time that they wrote it, they were consulting with companies like Amazon in the early days on how to convert website traffic. It’s really where the whole not about me mindset comes from because it changed the shift in focus of sales and marketing to be about what you do in the products that you offer, to really be all about the buyer and building buyer personas and everything circles around the buyer as if it was the sun and we were the planets.

Carole: It was really the thing that really framed my mindset of how I think about how we interact in sales and marketing, if it’s not all about the buyer, then we shouldn’t be talking about it.

Rich: What was the second?

Carole: Oh, this is going to be a tough one. I’m going to have to go with the “Science of Selling” by David Hatfield. He and I have bonded over the idea that we can change this negative mindset in the perception of sales and using science, that we can get predictable results, using science, that we can make sales repeatable and scalable using science, and that ultimately, we can create a buying experience that people want.

Rich: So, just in closing, how can people find out more about you and the work that you do? Clearly, we’re going to have links to the various things that we’ve mentioned in the conversation, but how can people find out more about your work and what you do?

Carole: Easiest way is on the website unboundgrowth.com, I am easy to find on LinkedIn. In fact, I think if you google my name, you’ll probably find me and if you can’t, I haven’t been doing my job very well. But I am on all of the social channels on LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram, if you really want to see what I do in my spare time. On YouTube, I do now twice a week video blog updates to specific to sales and sales management. There are five six-minute video clips that are really again just trying to give you something that you can take to try and get to that repeatable result.

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