Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 374 Q & A with Samantha McKenna

Summary

In this insightful episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, Matt Heinz and Samantha McKenna on Sales Lessons for Modern Times

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, “Show Me you Know Me! Sales Lessons for Modern Times“ and my guest is Samantha McKenna, Founder & CEO at #samsales Consulting.

Tune in to Learn:

1. The importance of financial preparedness and building a personal brand for first time entrepreneurs
2. Why you need to use the ‘Show Me You Know Me’ method
3. What it really takes for a long-term career in entrepreneurship (and what chewing glass and rocks has to do with it).

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

Matt: All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. I’m your host, Matt Heinz. So excited to have you here with us today. We’re going to do this quick– usually 15, 20 minutes in and out. But excited to have you here. Thank you for making this part of your day.

Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio, past, present, and future, always available at www.SalesPipelineRadio.com. Super excited we were able to make this happen. Sam McKenna. She is the founder and CEO of Sam Sales. Sam. Thanks for being here.

Sam: Hi, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Matt: So for those that maybe don’t know you and your story, talk a little bit about your background, how and when you started #samsales and what you guys focus on.

Sam: Yeah, really quick. So I’ve been in enterprise sales basically my whole career. I was in corporate America for about 13, 14 years before taking the leap to start #samsales. I was an IC for seven years, a leader, and then an executive leader after that, and wrapped up my time at corporate at LinkedIn, which was the holy grail of places for me to work in the end.

I got to be a leader there representing LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which I still feel like I bleed #samsales orange out of one arm and LinkedIn blue out of the other. I started #samsales in the fall of 2019, and we’re an all women team of nearly 20 and have over 250 clients. What do we do? We focus on top of the funnel sales training everything to do with LinkedIn and social selling.

And then we also build brands for executives on LinkedIn for LinkedIn themselves, we’re approaching 500 execs for celebrities, for everybody in between all of those. So that’s me and us, fastest delivery ever in a nutshell.

Matt: That’s pretty good. Yeah, I want to talk about the executive brand building on LinkedIn for a second. So I started my business in 2008.

It was a terrible time in the market. And my wife was also pregnant with her first child. So who needs healthcare? When you’re having a baby, right? It wasn’t quite that bad. She’s a teacher. And so like I was on her benefits for a long time. It worked out really well, but talk a little bit about that step.

Cause I talked to a lot of people, maybe you do too, who were like, I’d love to try to do my own thing, but they’re scared to do it. And I’m like, you will always be scared to do it. What gave you the confidence and courage to give it a shot?

Sam: You will always be scared to do it. In my career,

broken 13 different sales records. And when I was at LinkedIn, that was what I broke my 13th. I was on a plane every single week. And so I just thought, you know what? I feel like there is something special about my methodology. Whatever it is, I have no idea because it all seems really obvious to me.

But I wonder if I can leave this all behind, right? And I can take the leap to go and start a business and work part time and make half the money I made in SaaS. That wouldn’t be a terrible life. So I should have known myself better because I’m very type A and disciplined and that all went to hell in a handbag in a week.

But I think it’s just having confidence that what you do is something that the market needs and there’s a differentiator there. I would say two things, and maybe Matt, you agree or disagree, but I think one make sure you have some savings. So no matter how ethically amazing a sales you think you are, it will take a shitload of time for you to actually close deals and do it meaningfully.

And you will run out of runway really quickly. So make sure you’re in a financially stable place. Give yourself 18 months, 24 months of runway. Maybe 12 months, but give yourself some time because that pressure will stack up really quickly. I think the other thing is make sure you have a brand. So take some time to invest in your brand, get out on LinkedIn and start to connect with people.

If you have a bunch of clients now, wherever you work in corporate America, make sure to connect with them on LinkedIn. So you’re building that personal CRM for yourself, if you will. But I gave myself that shot and, I didn’t even create a website for I think 12 months. So that was like, let’s see how it goes.

And work email was my personal email. I don’t know, Matt, was it the same for you or were you like?

Matt: Yeah. People think I’m joking when I say, November 2008, I started with a laptop and a bus pass, but literally I started with a laptop and a bus pass. Like I had a bus pass that was going to last for another six months from the job I quit. I bought a new laptop. That was my one expense is I needed a computer. I’ve always only had work computers, so I need something. We had a plan, like we basically said she’s incredible and she believed in me, but she said we, it’s not guaranteed.

So there was a date at which we said, if you’re not profitable by then, but you really feel like you have pipeline and a runway, then we can tap into some savings. But then there was a second date, that if we hit that date and it really wasn’t happening… It’s never over forever. But it was like, okay, you got to go back and get a job for a while.

Thankfully, things picked up and it started out okay, but I don’t know if I’m busting a myth here, Sam, but there’s a phrase that a fellow entrepreneur here in Seattle used with me recently. So like doing this is sometimes like chewing glass, right? And from the outside, people can look at this and say, Oh man, you guys look like you’re doing great.

And to hear you, to see you online, Sam, to see the kind of traction you get on LinkedIn and to hear 20 people, all women, amazing. It is not all amazing, is it?

Sam: No. And you are never done building. That’s the thing. Like every time you turn around and there’s a new logo, you added a new quote, a new product that you can develop a slide deck that needs to be updated because the last time you did was 18 months ago.

It is like chewing rocks. You will also never work harder in your life, but it is for your own business. And I think that you’re building your way. I will tell you too, for anyone that’s Oh, 18 to 24 months of financial runway, and that’s what you want me to save. Okay. Just consider if you stay in corporate America another year, another 18 months, so that you can save that, it’s effectively giving you a runway to make sure that you don’t have to go back to corporate America, that you have more time to actually see if your idea is going to work.

So take it easy, right? And then make sure you’re really good to go when you’re good to go.

Matt: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And also just don’t overengineer things, when you can just do it. There’s a there’s that gap between knowing what you’re doing and breaking some glass and testing some things and pivoting, but also giving some things time.

And it’s always going to be harder than you think, right? You’re out on your own and you got to eventually you start making payroll. So you got to keep selling. And it’s just, what’s funny, like I’ve had a lot of people and I thought we were gonna talk about sales, but this is actually a little more interesting.

So I thought we were going to I, I have a lot of people that [00:06:00] say to go out and do this on your own. You have to be incredibly risk tolerant. And I don’t know that’s actually the case because I think that if you are doing your own thing, part of being successful is mitigating risk. And I think about this all the time.

Like someone says what’s the big benefit of having your own business? One of the first things that comes to mind is control, right? I’m a very anxious person and anxiety is a disease of control. And I realized I don’t control when this deal is going to close or when this check’s going to come in or whatever that is.

But I control so much more as an owner than I would if I was a CMO somewhere, to be honest.

Sam: Yeah. And I think no matter what, if you say in corporate America also you only have control over so many things, right? There’s a really beautiful part about creating your own business. I say this just like the way you would manage your finances early in life.

If you starve, so to speak, for the first few years Think about how you can sustain yourself for the next couple of decades. And I think the same thing goes here, like maybe after 18 or 24 months, you have enough [00:07:00] savings, you have enough built up, et cetera, that yes, you don’t know when the next check is going to come in and you don’t know if they’re going to pay on time.

And we have a client that’s 18 months in a rear on one of their paychecks. It’s a delightful situation. But things like that as long as you prepare and you’re ready for those headwinds, you’ll be fine. I’m not a risky person. I like control. I like process.

I like responsibility. I like having my shit together. That’s the kind of person I am, but you do need to toss some of that out in the early days. And just go for it. I also think, and I don’t know if this is where this was your path, Matt, but I meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are like, okay, I built the ship and I need to sell it.

So how do I do it? And I’m like, why did you build the ship? And they’re like, I thought it’s what everybody needed. And I’m like, did you vet this? Did you ask anyone? Did you sell something before it was built? And then think, okay, Oh, shit. Now I need to build the ship. I’m at the P’s and the T’s. That’s what I would say, because I, there’s so many people who build something and then they’re like, I have to go sell that.

Where instead of you say, like, how can it be of help to you? What do you need? What can I build for you? And then you build it for someone, build it for somebody else. You build a consulting practice and you find that everyone needs the same help with the same thing. So maybe you write a playbook, you start to sell a particular course that you have online.

You start to see what is rinse and repeat and you can scale. Do that before you build the ship and then have to find a buyer for it.

Matt: All of that and know that playbook will change over the years. Like what works will change, what’s needed will change, what’s perceived will change. We’ve certainly seen that, over sort of 16 and a half years now.

We’re still generally marketing strategy, consulting for complex sales situations to build more predictable pipeline. For 16 years it’s been about orchestrating the go to market motions, right? All the different outbound motions across sales, marketing, CS. What we’ve learned over the last three or four years is the complexity of the buying journey, the complexity of actually doing that work is killing companies. Gartner calls it collaboration drag. And so now increasingly, we are project management experts, helping people just get stuff done internally. And so to be able to know the customer well enough to [00:09:00] hear what they’re doing to say, okay, they may still need help over here, but no one is helping them actually get the work done internally.

And for a large organization that feels that collaboration drag very strongly. That’s a big thing. So for me as an example, just to what you said, listening to the customer, responding to what’s needed. I can go on off on a whole tangent. I know we’ve only got maybe about six more minutes– about people that build a company where their objective is an exit, as opposed to like your objective is to serve a market.

And if you do that well, the exit will be there. Anyway All right. I have two things I want to make sure we cover with you with the time we have left. We’ve got Sam McKenna here on Sales Pipeline Radio today. She’s the CEO founder of #samsales. There’s probably a very small minority of people that don’t know The Show Me Method that you promote, but can you summarize that a little bit for folks?

Sam: Yeah. Show me, is really exactly as it sounds. It’s showing up to know who your buyer is, what their space is going through, what their company is going through and having some kind of expertise on their entire situation. It’s also getting to know your buyers at a personal level. So do they tell you that they have a dog, that they have kids, that they have a dream to buy a house in Maine one day?

What is it that you know about them? And I think if you just look at the most basic level, what can you do to employees? Show me you know me today. I want to listen back to any of the calls that you have this week so far. And if you started the call with, Where are you based and how’s the weather there?

Two things that we probably, A, we know where they’re based because we can see them on their LinkedIn profile. Two, be better than the weather, you should have had some research done, right? Unless you’re British, and then don’t yell at me. But we should have done some research. We should know some things about them already.

We should come prepared with something to build a report on. So I think we really lack that. And especially because there’s so many meetings back to back. We just think there must be a reason they’re on the call. Why should I bother to learn anything about them? What a way to set yourself apart.

It might seem like table stakes and it is, but it just doesn’t happen.

Matt: There’s so much statements in sales and marketing that feel like table stakes that aren’t right. And we’ve been talking about account based go to market for forever. And like salespeople sell us, Oh, we’ve been doing it for forever.

We always manage the buying committee. Let’s look at your Salesforce, shall we? Like how many opportunities have one contact associated with them? You are single threading your deals. Let’s just be clear about what we are and aren’t doing here. So I gotta be honest, to me, you can say, Oh, it’s table stakes.

If all you do is table stakes, you will outsell, outperform everybody.

Sam: And then we were in the precarious position where we have everybody on LinkedIn who thinks that they’re an influencer and tells you, there was just a post yesterday that said, stop multi threading your deals. It’s killing you. And I’m like, please just make this person go away.

I just like, Oh my God. Need to judge who you’re listening to as well. Is it your Matts of the world that really understand the ins and outs of this space? Or is it the person was like an AE for nine months to three jobs. The now says he’s a three times sales leader– Oh my God.

Matt: And when you talk about getting to know your prospect, even just taking a couple of minutes and having a proven checklist and process to find a couple of things, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden that cold call is going to turn into a million dollar deal today, but it’s a process, right?

And so I think between, Show me you know me and having a consistent presence on LinkedIn and engaging with people in an authentic way. These are the building blocks to predictable pipeline, whether you’re an entrepreneur or whether you’re in sales or any go to market motion.

Sam: Completely.

And it’s all about the long game. Like I asked our AE about the other day, are you going to make a career out of this? Do you think you want to be in sales forever? And she said, I ultimately want to own my own business. So you need to start to think about all of these building blocks for the long term, right?

Write these sales lessons down, think about these things, really focus on how to prospect. Because even when you are a multi million dollar earning CEO, you’re still going to prospect. You just will, right? Even if it’s just a little here and there, learn these things. They’ll never go away.

Matt: So if people want to learn more about you, about #samsales if you were like, I really need to bone up on Show Me You Know Me,

where can people go to learn more about you and what you guys do?

Sam: Everything for free. You can hop on our YouTube channel. For still free, go toour website, www.samsalesconsulting.com. We have a newsletter. We have podcasts, we have webinars. We have women’s group all free.

If you wanna make a little investment, look on our website under the shorts section. We have a playbook or everything you can imagine from LinkedIn to Perfect Profile being an influencer. Show Me You Know Me to prospecting and everything in between. And we have a podcast. So check us out on Spotify. We prioritize guests that are overseeing at least 250 million in revenue.

And we had an incredible lineup so far with the great grandson of William Howard Taft is our fourth guest. And that was just launched this week. And I think that’s it.

Matt: That’s a lot. Sam, you’re the best. Thank you so much for being here. I know you’re super busy. We’ll make sure we get links to a lot of that in the show notes.

Thank you everyone for showing up, being here as we are already late February as we record this. It’s incredible how fast the year’s gone by, but we’ll be here next week with another episode. Until then, my name is Matt Heinz. We’ll see you next time on Sales Pipeline Radio. Take care.

Matt interviews the best and brightest minds in sales and Marketing.  If you would like to be a guest on Sales Pipeline Radio send an email to Sheena@heinzmarketing.com.