T-REX November Sales event Recap

We enjoyed a great night, with great content from featured speaker Doug Kaufman, former CEO of Transloc. Doug shared a message for all salespeople around this theme, "if you want to make serious money, stop focusing on money".  Doug is a serial entrepreneur with great experience and shared some good wisdom. Here is summary of some key points to help you with your journey!

• To be good in sales, you must know your "Why". Why do you like selling what you are selling and what gets you excited about it per helping and serving others. Know the "Why" on how you can help someone or a company and "why" you are excited to sell it! Know "Why" you can create value for people!
• Read "Brave New Work" by Aaron Dignan. Human beings can't thrive in a work culture that uses burnout and 'being always on' as proxies for dedication and success. This book shows us that, in fact, workplaces that empower people to take care of themselves are far more likely to deliver sustainable performance and happiness.
• Microwave Capitalism is creating a pressure environment to get return as quickly as possible. This is sometimes hindering longevity to company and healthy decision making. VCs want their money back within 3-5 years. Money out and money in quickly. This causes hardship on companies and an ideal selling process. High pressure selling with artificial timelines and false expectations creates low employee morale and poor engagement. To sell well you need healthy expectations, vision, support, and realistic timeline to close! 
• Sales is not about BtoC, BtoB, BtoG! Sales is about P2P! People to People!
• Joe Girard, #1 sales person in the world who sold average 6 cars a day for entire career said the #1 thing to sales success is: Trust & Empathy. "People Buy People Not Things." You must play the long game. It's about relationships. A sale is not the end of the party, It's just the beginning. Remember it's about People & Relationships. Show in your actions and words, "I Like You".
• The keys to BIG Money: Empathy, Trust, People, and The Long Game
• Don't be old school hunter who thinks of "ABC" and "Coffee Is For Closers". Think about caring first. Empathy for people to build trust and see every person as long term relationship to service and make happy customers.
• If you focus on commissions and money you start to think short term. This makes you miss real and bigger opportunities and more likely to do bad deals. Customers can smell you coming a mile away if it's only about closing. Bad deals result in more churn which hurts the company.
• To achieve great growth. Think Big! Don't sell to one account at a time. Think how you can you sell to bigger groups like a consortium that sells into all these accounts. Focus on the big strategic sale!
• Sometimes you need to give things away for free to win the bigger picture. Lose the short term revenue battle to gain more market-share and secure more data per winning the bigger valuation growth war! For example, running a test pilot for free to show value to win bigger partnership contract down the road can be a good strategy for longer term growth & valuation play.
• Remember reputation takes 20 years to build and 5 minutes to destroy. Integrity and character come first!

Special thanks to Vince Beese and Eric Boggs with T-Rex for putting on this nice event, speaker Doug Kaufman for presenting, and tasty pizza from sponsor DeMos with support from Will Barfield with "Barfield Revenue Consulting"!