How to monitor Compelling Event Signals on LinkedIn – in Just 7 Minutes with Jamie Shanks

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Jamie owns two companies; one is Sales for Life. If you go to www.salesforlife.com and you fill-in the coaching hotline, his team can do a 15-minute call and help you understand best practices, with pitfalls and challenges, and become a social, digital seller.

Summary:

Jamie Shanks is the CEO of Sales for Life, the world's largest Digital Selling training program for mid-market and enterprise companies.

Sales for Life has trained over 250,000 sales and marketing professionals, in dozens of industries. Jamie's workshops have been delivered across 6 continents, for brands such as Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Oracle, American Airlines & Intel. He is also the CEO of Pipeline Signals, a managed service BPaaS firm that's pioneering in Compelling Event - Signal Intelligence monitoring. They monitor the entire global account TAM for their customers, looking for sales opportunities and risks.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

Jamie told us that their ideal customer is a B2B organization with a growing salesforce that has a problem, typically sales generated pipeline at scale. He says that the principal problem is looking at the 'pipeline coverage'. For example, you need to close a million dollars from now until Christmas, you reverse engineer the number of units and revenue that you would need in extrapolating against the wind rate that you have. The average B2B company has an average 25% wind rate, that means you would need 4x the pipeline or 4 million in pipeline to achieve those 1 million dollars by Christmas. By analyzing that, you would know if you are ahead of the game or you are behind. From a sentiment standpoint, if your team is using that 'selling playbook' or what you call 'email-rinse-repeat', you will then recognize that the way you consume knowledge from the Internet is different from the way that your team is engaging to your customers. Because recent buyers now are digital, modern, and social. The biggest challenge we see with sales leaders, because they are the ones that devise the strategy in the sales place, and sellers execute it. The problem then is, the leaders believe that what made them successful in their heyday as a seller, that must be the playbook to indoctrinate to their team, which is not true because it evolves every year.  Another tip Jamie gave is that when you are looking at your sales organization, the number one element that makes or breaks quota attainment is account selection and prioritization. The time you spent on which account to focus on today, not tomorrow, matters. Humans make decisions in businesses; humans go in the businesses and they leave businesses, they bring with them competitors, they bring with them relationships. So, it's important to monitor humans because they are a leading indicator to where a priority goes in and out of a company.  

Jamie’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): What I like everybody to do is take a sheet of paper and at the center, draw or write the logo of one of your best and successful active customers. Then circle that name. Stare at that and tell yourself “Who cares about that story?" and then from there, draw spiderwebs outside of that company. There are people within that organization who leaves and go to other businesses. There are those who are the key stakeholders who can refer you to businesses. You are trying to find people that had walk a mile in your shoes or had lived around the success you built within the company. Reverse engineer it like using the tool LinkedIn and figure out who use to work there, where have they gone, who can refer me.  That singular spider webbing called the sphere of influence is a simple tactical you can do using LinkedIn.