Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 364: Q & A with Mark Cox

Summary

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing on Sales Pipeline Radio.

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

If you’re not already subscribed to Sales Pipeline Radio or listening live Thursdays at 11:30 am PT on LinkedIn (also on demand) you can find the transcription and recording here on the blog every Monday morning.  The show is less than 30 minutes, fast-paced and full of actionable advice, best practices and more for B2B sales and marketing professionals.

We cover a wide range of topics, with a focus on sales development and inside sales priorities.

This week’s show is entitled, “How to Fall in Love with Selling“ and my guest is Mark Cox, Founder of In the Funnel Sales Coaching.

Takeaways:

• Transform your mindset about selling: Discover how shifting from “pitching” to genuinely helping others can make you love selling and improve your success in the field.
• Learn to overcome call reluctance: Understand why many salespeople feel uneasy about cold outreach and how reframing your approach can turn prospecting into something you enjoy.
• Multi-channel prospecting that works: Explore why a mix of personalized emails, voicemails, and social selling is crucial for building a strong sales pipeline.
• Mark Cox’s entrepreneurial journey: Be inspired by Mark Cox’s decision to leave corporate life and start his own successful sales coaching business, proving that following your passion can lead to big rewards.
• The value of authentic selling: Uncover how being your authentic self in sales, without putting up a “sales face,” leads to more enjoyable interactions and better outcomes

Listen Now | Watch the video HERE | Read the Transcript BELOW: 

Matt: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. My name is Matt Heinz. I am your host. Very excited to have you here. We’ve got a great guest and great topic today. I think you’re really going to enjoy. But first just want to thank everyone for joining us who is joining us live today.

If you’re in the middle of your work day and work week, thank you for joining us live on LinkedIn. If you want to be part of the show and you’re joining us live, you can do so. You can make a comment, you can ask a question, a rebuttal, a rant you can troll us. It doesn’t, it’s live. You can do whatever you want. If we see that we can reference it. We can bring it up. If it’s a question, a comment, we can recognize you on the show as well. So thank you so much for doing that. If you are watching or listening on demand, Thank you so much for downloading and subscribing. Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio is always available past, present, and future at salespipelineradio.com. Very excited to have our guest today. He is the founder of In the Funnel Sales Coaching, the author of the new book, Learn to Love Selling, Mark Cox. Mark, thanks so much for joining us today.

Mark: Matt, thanks so much for having me today. I was really excited….

Matt: I was as well. I don’t know if we intended to do a home and away exchange today. You and I recorded your podcast earlier today and was super excited to have you join here today and have known of you for a long time. I followed you and your content. And when I saw your new book coming out, I knew we had to get you on the show. So for those that don’t know you yet, maybe do a little bit of intro of you and where and how you focus.

Mark: So I am the president and founder of a company called In The Funnel Sales Coaching. We help sales leaders, sales people, and BDRs and SDRs dramatically improve performance through sales training that actually impacts behavior. Prior to that, I spent most of my career running large sales organizations and outsourcing or technology companies and two other passions in life, in addition to family I’m a music fanatic.

So, love all types of music. And I’m still a terrible drummer after all these years. And I’m also a hockey fanatic. And so for 30 years, I’ve been loving the Toronto Maple Leafs, which will prove to your viewers that I obviously can’t be that bright.

Matt: Well, you are persistent and resilient if nothing else.

I’m in Seattle and we’re year three of the Kraken and it’s been fun. To watch Seattle really kind of become a hockey town team and really lean in with the team and the Kraken has done a great job in the community as well. Okay. So we, if we have time, we might get into a little bit of hockey ’cause I’m definitely on the learning curve. I love to watch, but it’s much more technical than people realize. But let’s talk first about this new book, “Learn to Love Selling”. You can get it at inthefunnel.Com. You can find it on Amazon. I mean, you’ve been doing this for quite a while.

You’re have your consulting firm for about 12 years. You’ve been doing sales and business development for a while. Why this topic? What about this topic in this angle was really important to you?

Mark: Yeah, what a great question. I think the topic and then the title. So, the content of the book is really this comprehensive playbook of thinking about everything you need to do to convert your core business capability into revenue and the model works at the leader level, at the CEO level and at the salesperson level managing their territories.

But, the reason I call it “Learn to Love Selling” I think there’s a lot of people in the profession today having a pretty tough time. And I think that tough time comes from two things. First of all, the core understanding of what sales truly is today in 2024 is wrong. You know, there’s a lot of folks out there who still believe it’s the 40 year old stereotype of pitching and cajoling and doing demos and that kind of stuff. And that’s all gone. What selling really is, is just helping somebody achieve a meaningful business outcome in a way that’s beneficial to them and you. So, it’s about helping, not pitching. And so those are these two things that I think dramatically improve somebody’s joy of doing this job.

A, I need to know what to do. But, first in my mindset, I need to understand, okay, what am I really doing here? Where am I adding value into the universe? I’m helping people. I’m making deposits in the universe. I’m not asking for withdrawals.

Matt: And if you are selling in a way where you are interrupting someone’s time, asking them for making it 100 percent ask, not having anything really to give in response, no wonder people have call reluctance, right? No wonder people don’t want to get on the phone. I think there’s a lot of reasons for it, but in part, I don’t think people feel good about what they’re delivering and what they’re doing.

Conversely, if you can figure out what is the value you provide to someone, not just getting them to sign the deal and to buy something from you, but what do you have a value for them where this interruption becomes irresistible, so to speak?

Mark: Yeah, so well said. I think the first one, Matt, is this kind of spiral of doom, right?

If you think you’re, you’re just pitching and cajoling, you don’t like what you do. The second thing you have to do in order to do that, people put up a veneer. Salespeople put up a veneer and to put on sales face. I can’t be my true authentic self. So they like what they do even less, right?

And it’s draining and exhausting rather than looking at it saying, you know, how do I prepare myself so that when I am reaching out, I have real insight and value and knowledge and best practice that I can give to someone. And if that’s my intent of every call and every discussion, don’t worry about the outcome.

I’m not just trying to create a qualified sales opportunity. If I start with trying to add value and help the outcomes will come our way.

Matt: So when you get a lead that says, I want to learn more about you, that’s a pretty easy phone call. When I am prospecting, that is a lot harder. So what are some approaches that you found work really well?

I know you cover some of this in the book and in your training and workshops, but what are some approaches that can help people feel better about Prospecting, feel good about the value you’re providing, and really learn– I don’t know, can you learn to love prospecting, Mark?

Mark: That’s our third book.

The second one is Learn to Love Leading for sales leaders, that’s 14 months from now, and then Learn to Love Prospecting. I think you can, but first of all, again, let’s start with this mindset. Yeah, you know, if people go into their job and what they do every day and they just think this is it’s a grind, you’re, you’re never going to enjoy it.

You’ve got to have a bit of a big picture. And so for those doing prospecting today, you should realize you’re doing the most important part of the sales cycle. Every company out there wants more new opportunities and you create them. So when you get good at this, if you can figure out strategically how to get good at this you’re going to be of huge value to future companies, which means your value increases. The way I’d like to look at how to do this, Matt, let’s make it easy for the folks listening today. What would you or I do? Let’s say you’re a president of a company. We’re reaching out to another president of the company to talk. The two things we do if we reach out, first of all, there’s no chance we’re reaching out to anybody without doing research.

So we would know the person we’re reaching out to, the company. We have a point of interest. We have a reason for the call. You and I have okay business acumen and industry acumen. So we’re doing that work. The second thing is, we probably have a pretty good answer when the other person on the other end of the phone says, Who are you guys? What do you do? We probably thought about our value proposition message. So we have those two things today. An articulate value proposition, and I can explain what’s in there. And we do research and have the point of interest prior to every call, I think we’re going to have dramatically better outcomes.

And by the way, it helps us break through that wall that everybody feels if you interrupt somebody in the middle of the day, you got 7 to 15 seconds to break through the wall, to get an authentic conversation out of them.

Matt: Talking today on Sales Pipeline Radio with Mark Cox. He’s the founder of In The Funnel Sales Coaching, the author of the new book “Learn to Love Selling” There’s your approach to prospecting and then there’s the objections to doing it and some of them are: email is dead,

no one responds to their email. You can’t use the phone anymore. People aren’t at the office. There’s barely any office lines that are work from home. Are these excuses or are these truths?

Mark: Well, by the way, I think there’s a little bit of truth in any comment out there but, depending upon who you’ve got on your podcast, you’re going to have somebody saying the phone’s dead, you got to do social selling. Somebody else is going to say social selling is dead. You got to do telephone. Somebody else is going to say email is the way to go. I really believe, Matt, if I’m trying to build pipeline, I think the answer is an either or, it’s an and. But I’ll make a couple of observations people should digest.

You and I are old enough to remember a day where one of the more expensive expenses we had was our actual cell phone because we would just get so many voicemails in a given day, we would literally fill our voicemail. That’s all gone now. Nobody leaves me a voicemail. So easy to stand out prospecting if you’re intelligent and can leave a decent voicemail.

The second thing is, as much as we say 40%, 50% of all the email going back and forth is spam. It still does work in certain circumstances. Again, I’m a big believer in doing the research and making it personal. Stop with the generic, just pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. If you show in the email you know who I am, that might trigger a little more.

And then there are some great social selling strategies out there. And of course you wrote a book on social selling not that long ago that had some very, very good ones in there. So I think today, if we want to get the attention and interest of somebody, we have to use every channel available to us.

But we have to be good at those channels. It’s not a volume thing. It’s not a pure automation thing. We actually have to leverage our intelligence to, personalize, humanize the reach out.

Matt: Well, and I’m here to say, the second biggest source of pipeline for us this year has been the telephone. It’s been calling people, leaving voicemails.

It’s following up from there. But it’s that campaign that has really been successful. Now it’s not cold calling necessarily. It’s warm calling. These are people that know me. They’re not necessarily current clients or even past clients, but people that I know from various whatevers, but you’ll leverage that and you have something of value to share.

And you know I have still have call reluctance. It’s still hard for me to schedule and protect the time I need to do my prospecting. But I’ve really learned to enjoy it because I believe that I have something valuable to share and contribute when I do that.

I know we’ve got a few more minutes here before we wrap up. I want to go back to May of 2013. So you have a long, successful career in selling. And in May 2013, at least according to LinkedIn, that’s when you sort of started In the Funnel Sales Coaching. What’s your origin story? A lot of people listening to this, people that are very successful in their career.

People think about, boy, it’d be interesting if I could take my expertise and do my own thing. That is a very scary thing. You and I both know that firsthand, but how did that get started and why did you do it?

Mark: Well, thanks for the question, Matt. So, at the time I was in a break. I had been leading large sales organizations and different outsourcing and technology companies and had decided I wanted to pull back a little bit on my travel and so I stepped away from something and for being at that role, it was probably going to take me a year to find the next really large U. S. technology company that wanted to sell into the Canadian marketplace, likely into big Canadian banks. And I’d want to run one of those. So, while I was engaging in a search campaign, a few smaller organizations came to me and they kind of said, Listen, we’re not hiring you, we can’t afford or attract someone like you, but why don’t you help us?

And before I knew what was happening, I was working with three of them– two tech companies and then one financial services business. But I was doing this while I was in this search campaign and I was actually interviewing with a large U. S. tech company wanting to change their leadership in Canada.

Left one of these companies  they’re called Purefax. And I was working with one of these companies, I literally told the team, hey, I’ve got an interview, and this was a 5th or 6th interview. And the Canadian operations were 2 doors down from them here in downtown Toronto, so leave the Purefax offices, walk 2 doors down, go into this interview and there’s 5 or 6 people around this table.

And as I was going through the interviews, I was already starting to think of, okay, when I take over this organization, that person’s gone and this person’s not going to make it. I’m thinking about the whole go to market. It was asking them a lot of questions about what’s working, what isn’t working. And then it just hit me, Matt, right in the middle of this interview.

And I was probably in that room for three hours, but about 90 minutes [00:13:00] in it was I would rather go back and help Purefax than actually run this thing. So I played nice for the rest of the interview. I went downstairs and instead of going back to my smaller technology company, they’re large now, but they were small then. I made a right instead of a left and went to a coffee shop and then just called my wife, Donna. And said, Hey, listen, I don’t think I’m going to work for anybody anymore. I think I can build a business out of doing what I’m doing here. And that was the origin story. And so it was super fun.

Matt: Thank you for sharing that. We were talking about my origin story or in the earlier podcast. I’ll leave it at that. I’ll tease it so people just want to check out the Selling Well Podcast in a little bit when our episode comes out. But it’s exciting. I remember it being very exciting and terrifying and assuming that would wear off. And I’m coming up on 16 years from when I just head out with a laptop at a bus pass. Still exciting and terrifying. (Yes) I can name countless reasons why it’s a hundred percent been worth it. And at some  point we should do a session on just the entrepreneurial journey.

Mark: Let’s do that for sure.

Matt: I know a lot of people that I think would be very, very successful doing it. And it is a scary thing if you haven’t jumped off that cliff without a safety net and tried to do it. But I think for, for those of us that have done it and have, at least speaking for myself, made a lot of mistakes along the way you know, and can help others figure out what that path is with a little higher likelihood of launch velocity. I think that’d be great.

But I’m going to wrap up here. On your LinkedIn profile, underneath your name, it says learning never exhausts the mind. And we were talking about this in your podcast earlier. What are some of the places you go to, to continue to learn about sales and go to market?

Mark: So, one of the places is running my podcast.

So the Selling Well, we have these really smart, great guests like you earlier today. And when we do that, Matt, we do the research on the guests. So we’re trying to read their books, understand their blogs, some of their white papers. So we’re digesting content to stay current. And that’s not just for sales, but for leadership and coaching and mindset and all of those kinds of good things.

Second place, frankly, is we still have our subscription to Harvard Business Review. I still love getting the magazine in the mail and reading through. It’ll trigger me to go online and look at other topics that they’re speaking about. And there’s a handful of podcasts, including yours, Sales Pipeline Radio that we really enjoy.

We’ve got those built into our habits. And I listened to podcasts driving in and out of work. And I love to do my reading first thing in the morning because I’m drinking coffee and boy, I am so happy when I’m drinking coffee. So I’m also pretty happy in the morning.

Matt: Love it. Same question, different topic. Learning never exhausts the mind. We talked about hockey at the beginning. I’m watching a lot of Kraken hockey over the last couple of years and just continue to learn about this sport that on the surface looks like they’re just peddling around a piece of rubber, trying to get into a net, but it’s way more complicated than that and way more interesting.

And the strategy and all the tactics and the approaches teams have, where are some of the places for folks like me that are emerging hockey fans, and maybe this is a selfish question, where, where are some of your favorite podcasts, other places to read about hockey?

Mark: So to be honest with you, I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts on hockey. I’m a fanatic. I watch, watch a lot of hockey and I still play a lot of hockey and I’m a goalie. So, I’ll still go to training to try and get better, even though I think my chance of making the NHL came and when it’s all over now.

But a great friend of mine, actually loves a podcast called Spitting Chicklets. I think it’s the most popular hockey podcast out there, and the reason it’s called Spitting Chicklets is because, of course, in the old days when there was no mask and cage, if you get a puck in the mouth, you’re spitting your teeth out because you’re going to come out, and they call them chicklets.

Hey, I lost a chicklet on that one. That’s why hockey players look like me.

Matt: It’s not the first time I’ve heard about that podcast. I’m definitely gonna have to check it out now. But before people check out spitting chicklets, I want them to buy a copy of Learn to Love Selling.

Where else can people learn more about you, Mark, and continue to learn from you and read from you.

Mark: Oh, thanks. So easiest place, LinkedIn. Please check me out and connect with me, it’s Mark Andrew Cox on LinkedIn. And the company name is In the Funnel. You can go to www.inthefunnel.com and we love to hear from you on our podcast and everybody will know about our most recent podcast with Matt Heinz.

That’s the Selling Well Podcast. Wherever you listen to your podcast on Apple or Spotify, that’s where you can hear about us.

Matt: We’ll definitely check that out. Find the book on Amazon. Check out in the funnel.com for the Selling Well Podcast and more content from Mark. Mark Cox. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Mark: Thanks so much for having me, Matt. What a pleasure.

Matt: Absolutely. Well, thank you everyone for listening, for watching, for being part of this. We’ll see you next week on another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. Until then, take care. We’ll see you soon.