Contributed by:
Alex Boyd, Founder/CEO, RevenueZen
Joe Barhoum, Pamplin School of Business Adjunct Professor and Founder, Conduit Construct
On Thursday February 18, Professor Joe Barhoum’s class met virtually with Alex Boyd, local sales leader and the Founder/CEO of RevenueZen, a marketing agency that helps entrepreneurs build ideas into thriving businesses.
Along the way, Joe and Alex shared lessons learned from years in the trenches: having confidence in your own long term success, building relationships and not transactions, and balancing personal accountability and vulnerability.
We wanted to share our favorite quotes from the lesson, for you to enjoy!
What is a salesperson?
“Someone who helps people make decisions. You’re a decision influencer. If you can synthesize information into knowledge quickly and make useful things out of that knowledge, you’re going to be good at sales because you don’t have to do much actual ‘selling’. Which stands in contrast to ‘selling by arm twisting’ or by simply being loud and persistent.”
-Alex
Invest In Relationships
“That’s something we’ve talked about before in this class: how, if you think of every transaction as more of a relationship, you have the opportunity to build a network. Eventually, after you pick the fruit, another one grows later on. You have the ability to really help people at multiple times in their lives, and it becomes way more than just a transaction.”
-Joe
Build Authentic Self-Confidence
“I once had a boss who was a very good salesperson; but the way his personality is, he made me feel like I was a bad salesperson. And here I am: I’ve written sales books. I lecture on sales. I teach young adults and I teach grown professionals that have been selling for 30 years. They say, ‘Wow, you know so much about selling – I love how you do this and that’. And yet for a long time my former boss had me believing that I’m not a good salesperson. I could just imagine being, you know, a pretty decent basketball player and your coach says you suck, go do something else. Those are the kind of conversations that he and I were having. So to be on my own now and just be able to just be me: It’s OK that my kids are on my lap and I’m doing this recorded lecture, it’s OK to just be who you are. I really feel like I had this opportunity to really be myself once I was completely on my own.”
-Joe
Encourage Vulnerability In Others
“At my second sales job, I realized that if I started calls by saying something wacky or interesting about how my day was going, people would think, ‘Oh, this is a safe place that I can let down my guard in, and that would lead them to a better, more open conversation with me. So I started doing it more often.”
-Alex
Appreciate The Details
“I think it’s the little things, right? People notice whether you’ve done your research, gone the extra mile, thought of the little details that make their lives easier, and they’ll reward you by buying from you. In sales, you’re looking at all the details of someone’s experience, and helping craft that experience for them. You’re making it easier for them to take one more step toward a successful decision. Now, if you do that and if you look at your whole whole career in that kind of process: of creating a better and better customer experience, you’ll grow better at sales year after year.”
-Alex
Accountability to Continuous Learning
“There are a few different levels. There’s this whole act of selling to customers that you’ll get better and better at. Eventually you think, ‘yeah, I can really sell well to customers now’; but then you take a manager job and you realize, ‘I don’t know how to sell internally! Or to my boss or to the CEO. There’s a whole new game to learn. Then there’s: how do you sell to recruit people for your team? You never stop gaining knowledge, and when you’re a business owner, market forces keep you training hard, and you know that you can never really fall behind.”
-Joe
Keep Your Business Plan Flexible
“I did not have the business model planned, starting out. In fact, recently someone had asked for my original sales deck – and I barely recognized it! It was so different from our model today. These things sort of unfold as they go. It may seem like entrepreneurs come in with a fully baked business plan. But in reality, many don’t, and you probably don’t need or want a business plan if you know your field well.”
-Alex