Episode 258: Carole Mahoney
Meet
Carole Mahoney
As the founder of Unbound Growth, Carole Mahoney has been called the “Sales Therapist” by a Harvard Business School professor where she coaches Entrepreneurial MBA students on sales. Carole has been featured as a top 15 Sales Influencer by LinkedIn, a Woman to Watch in Sales by Sales Hacker, and a top sales coach by Ambition. Currently she is writing her first book for business owners and entrepreneurs who sell themselves and their products everyday and struggle with finding the time, the right messaging, or the best process to get new customers and clients but might not realize that what might be getting in their way is their own mindset towards sales. Her belief is that selling isn’t something we do to others, it is something we do with them.Our Mission Is To Change The Negative Perception Of Sales People
Our Vision Is A World Where Selling Is A Profession To Be Proud Of
Digital selling is omnichannel—anything that you can use online. It can be digital assets, PDFs, web pages, interactive quizzes, communities, and more. But when you sell digitally, you have to make a conscious effort to understand and engage with your buyer in ways and places they prefer. That’s why agility and flexibility are essential to the process. Carole Mahoney shares her thoughts on the digital sales process in this episode of Sales Reinvented. Don’t miss it!
Outline of This Episode
- [1:33] The difference between digital and social
- [2:11] How to improve digital selling
- [3:30] Carole’s digital selling strategy
- [4:43] Attributes salespeople need to succeed
- [6:39] Tools + techniques + strategies to utilize
- [8:45] Top 3 digital dos and don’ts
- [10:46] Learn to be digitally agile
How to improve digital selling
In 1993 when the internet was first being launched, Carole realized that it would change everything—including the way people communicate and form relationships. That’s how organizations need to think of digital selling today. It’s been ignored for so long because face-to-face was an option, and thought to be more effective. But the way people buy has been changing since the internet was born. Businesses need to catch up!
They need to be in tune with what is going on with their buyer when they’re engaging in these channels. Carole notes that they often make rash decisions to put everything online without thinking about buyer experience. You must learn from your buyers: how do they prefer to engage online? You don’t want to develop things that annoy or distract from what they’re trying to do.
Carole’s digital selling strategy
Carole emphasizes that you have to start with conversations with prospects, buyers, and current customers to collaborate. Selling is something you do with others—not to others. If you want to build a strategy, it needs to start with one-to-one conversations. You need to learn about their pain points and frustrations and what to solve.
How do they go about making confident decisions? How do they prefer to engage? In what ways? Some people hate email. Others can’t get off of it. How do your unique buyers want to communicate? Everyone has a different way to prefer to communicate online. You use that information to design a sales process that’s in alignment with how people buy.
What attributes do salespeople need to have to succeed with digital selling? Listen to learn more!
Tools + techniques + strategies to utilize
Carole recommends that all sales teams use Gryphon Networks. Most people just do call reviews and look at what’s already happened—things you can’t have an impact on. But things like role play and real-time coaching with your salespeople can be a game-changer. Gryphon has an AI that can be trained to give the seller coaching prompts at the moment. It can enhance the digital conversation sellers are having.
Carole also recommends finding out where your team places in core competencies. She uses an assessment that can help you focus where your team needs further training and development. If you’d like to assess your team for free and see how they compare to the competition in your industry, check out the Sales Force Evaluation.
What are Carole’s top 3 digital selling dos and don’ts? You’ll have to listen to find out!
Learn to be digitally agile
Carole recently held a webinar series for Revenue Collective. Normally, she’d get a list of the people that signed up for the webinar and she’d personally reach out to them. But Carole didn’t get a list. So in her presentation, she shared some links for tools and techniques that were downloadable from her website that people could use immediately. She also made sure her LinkedIn profile was easy to find. What happened?
Several people from the same company looked at her LinkedIn profile and other downloaded tools. She noted who they were, and reached out to one of them. She sent an email asking about what they downloaded and asked a specific question about it. In the end, it resulted in valuable conversations and Carole will be working with them soon. It was a 45–60 day sales cycle with a Vidyard video and emails—how they wanted to interact.
The moral of the story? She had to adapt. She had to find a way to connect with people and provide them valuable resources. She had to find out who was interested in learning more and how to have a conversation. She had to use her website and digital assets to find those people and make it easier to engage. It goes to show that you can have a playbook, run the plays, and do the drills. But when you get on the field, you have to adapt. If you can’t adapt, the play will fail, and you’ll lose the game.
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Resources & People Mentioned
- Objective Management Group
- Assess your team for FREE with Unbound Growth’s Sales Force Evaluation
- Pavillion Revenue Collective
- Vidyard
Connect with Carole Mahoney
Connect With Paul Watts
Audio Production and Show notes by
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Learn More About Carole Mahoney
Are there any great Digital or Social Selling books that you highly recommend? 101 Ways to Rock LinkedIn by Viveka Von Rosen.
Who do you most admire in the sphere of Digital or Social Selling and why? Viveka Von Rosen and Brynne Tillman. I learn something new about how to up my LinkedIn game every time I talk with them.
Are there any aspects of your own Digital or Social Selling skills that you are working on improving at the moment? Focusing on my audience. It is so easy to get distracted by the next big Clubhouse and feel like you are missing out but remember who you are there to help keeps me from getting too distracted.
Hobbies, Interests? Gardening, yoga, pilates, biking, hiking, swimming and writing!
How can our listeners contact with you? www.unboundgrowth.com or on LinkedIn
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