309: Unlock Your Sales Genius Within - with Joe Ingram

EPISODE SUMMARY

In the world of software sales, success is not merely about numbers; it's about transforming interactions into meaningful connections. In this week’s episode of Scale Your SaaS,  Joe Ingram, CEO of Ingram Interactive, joins host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach, to share profound insights on the art and science of salesmanship. 

From the importance of education to the power of entertainment, this episode delved deep into uncovering the sales genius within each individual. Read now to learn more.

PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE

Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach

Episode: Episode No. 309, “Unlock Your Sales Genius Within - with Joe Ingram”

Guest: Joe Ingram, CEO of Ingram Interactive

Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor

Sponsored by: Leadfeeder

TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE

• Understanding the Power of Edutainment
• Leveraging Psychology in Salesmanship
• Embracing the Journey of Sales Mastery

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• The Evolution of Salesmanship: Beyond Numbers
• The Pitfalls of Quantity-Centric Approaches
• The Essence of Results-Driven Salesmanship

TOP QUOTES

Joe Ingram

[07:11] "Sales is only a numbers game until you become educated."

[10:52] "Education is the cornerstone of effective salesmanship, transforming the game from a numbers-driven endeavor to a strategic art form."

[21:52] "As soon as people start laughing, strangers pat each other on the back. Strangers become friends because they're so wrapped up in the laughter."

Matt Wolach

[09:56] "Humans cannot connect to a brand, a company like we don't connect with that. We connect with people."

[16:03] "The journey towards sales mastery is a multifaceted endeavor, guided by the principles of edutainment and anchored in the pursuit of tangible results."

LEARN MORE

To learn more about Ingram Interactive, visit: https://ingraminteractive.com/ 

You can also find Joe Ingram on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeingram/ 

For more about how Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com.

Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free trial: https://www.leadfeeder.com/ 

Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:

• Sales Tips
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram

Transcript

Matt Wolach: 0:07

And welcome to Scale Your SaaS, thank you very much for being here. I'm really glad that you joined us today. By the way, if this is your first time, just know that we are here to help you do exactly that scale your Sass by generating a whole bunch of awesome leads, making sure you know how to close those opportunities and building a team around you so that others can do all that for you. So if you want all those things, definitely hit the subscribe button right now that way you'll be notified about all of these fun things of all the new episodes where we bring innovative leaders and visionaries like my guest today to you. My guest today is Joe Ingram. I am super excited about having him on the show. Joe, how you doing today?

Joe Ingram: 0:43

I'm fantastic. I learned very young in life that you wake up every day and say, If I wake up without a chalk outline around me, then I have to accept that as a good day.

Matt Wolach: 0:55

That is a good day seeing that son come up as always fantastic. As we get older and older, I would echo that more and more. But Joe, you are you're really strong at what you do. I want to make sure everybody knows who you are and what you're doing. So Joe is the CEO of Ingram Interactive. He is a highly accomplished 30 year sales innovator with over 1.7 billion in sales billion with a B with extensive knowledge of human psychology, communication styles, buying triggers, and E commerce conversions, he transforms your results within months, not years. Joe is the personification of edutainment, he perfectly fuses education with entertainment to ensure maximum absorption and ease of implementation. He's also the host of the Sales Genius Podcast. When it comes to sales. This guy knows his stuff. I am super, super delighted. He's here. So Joe, thanks for being here.

Joe Ingram: 1:47

Absolutely Matt. One of the things I coined in the beginning, when I got into sales and started actually becoming as I said, sales is only a numbers game until you become educated. Because once you understand how to convert, it's no longer let's just massively do activities. And I think that's where a lot of us get burned out. And we get to the point sales isn't for me, is because if you don't have the right things to say you don't have what your focus is, then the answer is dial the phone more, send more emails, send more text messages, write reach out to more people on LinkedIn with a cold, really bad message, right, that goes out there and you go see, I had to do 1000 of them to get one person to talk to me. And I'm like, See, you're playing a numbers game. I want to play a quality game. So let's change it more than one time, I've rewrote somebody's really bad opening pitch on LinkedIn, and sent it back and said, Well, I'm not interested based on the approach. But if you had changed it to this, I think you might get better results, right? And then I get somebody like a month later going, that totally changed the game. And I'm like, okay, but again, I would rather do you know, five things to get one interaction with somebody as opposed to 1000. And so I would just say, Stop telling yourself, it's a numbers game, you need to actually step up and get better.

Matt Wolach: 3:17

I love it. And I think that's actually, you know, I have a it's not, I guess I would call it a theory because I haven't fully proven it. But basically, what I've seen is that sales as the company grows and gets bigger, gets worse. For example, just wait till you have Facebook, people calling you about the ads you're placing, and it is terrible. They have no idea what they're doing, they have no idea how to sell you. As the company gets bigger sales becomes tougher and tougher to keep quality sales. And part of it is right there. You just mentioned it, you've got the director or the VP breathing down your neck saying you need a numbers, you need the numbers, you need the numbers, Do this, do this, do this, instead of let's focus on how we're going to be able to help people. Do you see similar things, Joe?

Joe Ingram: 3:56

Absolutely. And so I see to me, the answer is the second you lower what your ideal customer is, and accept that one below. Right? Again, I've never had a customer that got a discount and was happy. Okay, and most people think the easiest way, right my salespeople that our customer advocates, they jump out there and go they need a discount they and they don't even know that there's a discount available until you coach them through it. But you give the discount as a way of building rapport, which means they didn't like you till you made it about price. And you go Why is everything about price? Well, why is it this way? Why can't I hold gross like the other guy? Why is my checks followed than everybody else on the team? And the answer is you've lost focus on building value. You've lost focus on building actual connection with another human being. Right and, man, I'm the guy that says sales is about results, not relationships. I think the result bolt generates the relationship. That's how you keep people sticky. Right? I don't want people paying me and me giving them no result. Right? That's not going to help me, it's not going to get you a referral, I guarantee you that. And so no, he's just a really nice guy. That's the worst thing I could hear from a prospect talking to one of my customers.

Matt Wolach: 5:23

Well, I'm a big believer in that I love that I want everybody remember that sales about is about results and not relationships. And in fact, you know, the book, the challenger sale, of course, kind of proves this. So you are backed by science, my friend, because everybody thought, Oh, I just need to be buddy, buddy with all of my prospects, and they're gonna love me, and they're gonna want to buy from me. And that's actually not the case they want to buy from you, when you educate them, and you help them understand exactly what's going on in their business in their industry, and how they can improve, not necessarily their friend. Now, once you do that, and once you do those things, they're gonna love you. And they're gonna say, Holy cow, this guy's awesome. He's helping me out so much. I follow him, I trust him. And whatever he says, I need to do I need to do that. So I think it is exactly the reverse of what you said, That's awesome.

Joe Ingram: 6:07

And in the Challenger sale book, right? When you look at it, what's the number one thing it takes for relationships over time, I don't have time, right, I don't have time to just keep chasing people back and forth, hoping one day they'll like me enough to do a meeting. Right, you need to have the ability to internalize your benefits. And your here's one thing I'll throw out because it just just hit me. We always devalue what we have learned and mastered. Okay, so we don't assign a value to it. We go, I've already learned it, you may go pay for a seminar, right? You're investing time to listen to match show. Why? Because you want to get better. But once you learn something, you walk away with it, you now devalue it, because you've already learned it. And you don't assign the value of your time and your money and what you put into that learning that skill. And when you do that, you now be little, your ability to communicate with another person. Right? I know that when I sat down and started figuring out all the sales I did, like we were talking before, in 2020, is where I came up with, hey, up to this point, it's 1.7 billion. And then I stopped and I said, now I'm gonna go back and add up all of the classes, all of the trainings all of the time I spent learning to get this skill set, because again, we don't go learn everything and then go sell. That's not what we do. We go out, we start selling, we learn something, we pick up something from the person next to us, we go back and forth. And we continue to go forward, but we don't actually stop and assign it. But when you look over and go, it takes what for mastery is the 10,000 hours that they say you're gonna go and do that a lot of us have way more than that. But we also don't have that ego pushing us out there to do it. Now I do have one, I named the sales genius, right? So I I have the ability to say, hey, I'll call myself that now. Challenge me I'm okay with that. But I also know that if I don't know, I'll learn something. And that's, that's where a lot of people miss.

Matt Wolach: 8:19

Yeah, Agreed. Agreed. And I think that's so true. Everything you're saying is so smart. Because you're right. We do pick it up along the way we do learn from that experience of seeing what happened that worked well, what didn't work. Well, what they said that worked well that they told you about. I totally agree. And you just talked about the sales genius. I know you've mentioned this approach of unearthing the sales genius within Can you talk a little bit about that, and what that means?

Joe Ingram: 8:44

Yeah, so what we do is we've defined so many speakers have gone out many people that go through and say everybody has their own level of genius, in whatever area it is. So typically, we walk in, I like to make training fun, I'll tell you, I mean, the genius part of what I do, and I'm okay to say this is that I can take the complex and make it simple. Okay, while adding humor. so other people can take complex and make it simple, but nobody wants to learn it. So when I sit down, I will connect with people on a different level. So mad if I got you to laugh while we were sitting here and I said something, it meant your ego has dropped. Okay? Because if you hated me, right, if somebody's listening, right, I'm going to hate his voice, whatever, they're going to click off. Right? They're not going to be paying attention but if you hate the other person, it doesn't matter how funny they are, you'll never laugh. Okay, we see that a lot in culture today is that I don't care what you said. I just don't like you. So therefore we cancel whatever it is. You could have said you know, how do you cure cancer? But the answer is I don't like you because the way you look what you do, but but they come in. So I like to break down strategies with People and find what resonates with them. Because you're gonna have somebody who's in sales that is great at prospecting, can't close anything. You got somebody that only knows how to close, and you have them prospecting. And so to determine that, right, I tell people all the time I say, Look, if you let's say we we do phone calls, we go call into a client, that person answers the phone. Sometimes it goes, click, and you don't even have to try. It's just Oh, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And it's back and forth. And you're like, yeah, why can't they all be this way, right. And then you pick up another phone call, pick it up, and it's combative. And they're angry, and they're coming at you, right? The genius part of it is, is listen to what they say, right? And I'm not giving you any thing, crucial here, listening to somebody you should do, hey, that's part of the job, okay? But listen for who they remind you of. There's someone on your team that pisses you off, when I go into companies, and I sit down and I go, Look, this is going to bother some of you when people start turning you their prospects, but you need to turn your prospects to the other salesperson that you like the least. And they go what and I'm like, You're gonna pick up so many more deals, if I, if I'm on the phone with you matter, I'm doing a meeting with you. And we aren't clicking, I need to get you to the other guy I don't click with that's on my team. And then we put the two of you on a meeting and all you hear is this really loud click. Because to them, it's not them changing anything about themselves, and they're going forward. So as soon as you can determine what it is that you specialize in, so bringing out that genius is for you to just accept who you are. Let it be and look for the people that are right that personality types, depending on how many you go out there, the government keeps doing billion dollars worth of studies to come back and tell us they're still four personality types. Right? They always since the 1900s. They do it every couple of years, they just renamed the four types. So the odds of you clicking with somebody is about 25%. Okay, that'll be the high. Okay, so typically, it's about 20%. Because it's going to take five people for you to find your match. And so when you sit back and go, Oh, 20% close, you go really, that means you close just the people that are like you. And that doesn't take a lot of work. So then we start learning different things. So I go into Personality Typing, I'll go into, you know, faci, origami, all kinds of stuff, like little things for anybody watching the video, right? And I always tell these people like, look, anytime you see a woman in sales, right? They there's there's two connotations, either she's not working hard, or she's just gonna barrel over you. And I'm like, No, it's not. It's, she's a person just like the rest of us. And they're like, oh, no, no, you watch out for that one. You're like, just because she don't take your junk. Doesn't mean that she's less than, you know, perfect. But I look at it and say, Come on, looking at it on this video that we have here. So if you're face to face or on video with someone, women view shoulder to shoulder communication, as trust. Okay, so Matt, if you and I square up shoulder to shoulder, what does it mean? We're squaring up, we're squaring up. It's it's fight time, right? So if you look at couples, a lot of times the woman walks up, squares her shoulders to the man and goes so what did you do yesterday? What happened with this? And the guy goes, Why you come at Why do you attack me? Why do you come at me and do blah, blah, blah. And she's like, all I did was ask you a question. Right? But most people don't know this at all. So in a sales environment in a zoom environment, when you're doing video calls with people, women square up on the monitor, if you look at us, your shoulders are pivoted automatically. We're not squared, straight up in here. I will pivot this way you will pivot that way. Why? nonconfrontational easier to have a discussion, where a woman would square up to the screen, and the guy sitting there going, Man, she's really coming at me and she's going, I'm just being honest. But because no one knows that. Right? It's viewed as you being combative. You being a ballbreaker, you're coming at me. And so as soon as you do that right at home, go ahead, walk up to your wife, grab her by the shoulders. Okay, so now you're lined up and then you tell her you're the most beautiful creature I have seen in my life, and then hold on, because her knees are buckling at that point. She's like, wait, go on, where typically guys, we talk side to side. Okay, If you think about it, if you're driving in a car, right, the guys driving woman's to pass your seat, where's her left knee on the center console. Right? And you instinctively because she keeps turning towards you, you talk to her like this, even though you're supposed to be watching the road. Okay, but that little bit of communication and face to face and zoom will help you if you're a female, or if you're a guy, and you have to square up to the monitor, because your prospect is a woman. Right? Anytime I sit down and do face to face deals, especially if it's a couple or something I will have, I'll set myself across from a woman, if it's five or six people in a boardroom. Right, I will look to see where most of the women are sitting and sit across from them, so that I can square them. And as I talk to them, I turn my shoulders towards them. You're automatically nonconfrontational with the guys, when you focus on another female to put your shoulders aligned with, well, that will push you over and make because what do you need? After you get up and they go take a break, and they're gonna go make a decision, you need the ladies to say, I don't know, but I trust him. I like there's something about him. That's different than the other vendor, who as a man kept pivoting, because he didn't want to be confrontational.

Matt Wolach: 16:20

I love this. And psychology is always so interesting. And something that, you know, I think within sales is so powerful. And obviously, there's been a lot of studies on this and written into this. And Cialdini, of course, is big on it. But I think that, you know, it's funny, because there's a lot of things I teach my clients, and they say, I never would have had any idea about I never would have known. I think that's the that's the problem with a lot of people in sales is there's a lot of sales, it's not intuitive, you would not know the shoulder thing, you would not know that if you do this or that it's actually going to work instead of what you might think the opposite. And so it's it's, it's crazy how often I'm sure you and I both talk to clients, and they're just like, I had no idea but then they go off and do it. And they come back and say, Holy cow, that that revolutionize what a difference.

Joe Ingram: 17:08

Yeah, and you're like, exactly. So in a lot of people like in insurance business or in retail sales, I always tell them, I'm like, when you go into your office to sit down when you're gonna sit across the desk from somebody, if it's a couple, hold out the chair that sits right across from you, because there ain't no guy gonna go sit in that chair. Right. And so that way, you'll put the spouse in the seat, then the guy will take the other chair. So now you're at an angle and you do this now me, I will sit there and I would go. Don't move your shoulders. Don't move the shoulders. Don't move your shoulders, no shoulders, right. And I will try to turn and do everything but keep my shoulders square. Because I don't want to be perceived as less than truthful.

Matt Wolach: 17:54

Wow. Wow. That's great.

Joe Ingram: 17:56

Don't use that for evil. Everyone. Not at the club.

Matt Wolach: 18:00

Definitely Use your powers for good. Good. Yes. Okay, so you talk also about edutainment, and that's something that I think is a really cool coining. So tell us, what is edutainment? and how are sales reps supposed to use it?

Joe Ingram: 18:15

Okay, so I got that little nickname from Glenn Morshower the actor from he played way too many movies. I was sitting on a conference call with him one day and he says he says everybody needs to understand. Joe is the absolute personification of the word edutainment. And I said, Glenn, thank you so much. I have no idea what that means. Right. And he starts laughing. And so he we talked afterwards. But edutainment just the first of the word is education. And then entertainment. So remember, education is first, your goal is to impart knowledge to someone else. entertainment piece means Can you make it fun? Can you make it so that because I will tell you I walk into many companies, right? Or even if I'm speaking at an event, right? When you walk up? What is everybody thinking? Who's this dude? He can't teach me anything, he can't do anything. And the second, you can add humor to it, even if it's self deprecating humor, right to get them to laugh. The second they laugh, the ego steps aside, and you now have the ability to drop in some education for them to take. And so I always say we got to have a fun way to make it happen. When I do a group training. I always start with a prank video, why we're in sales. We're in sales. So if you go in there and it's on College Humor, it's the half court basketball shot.

Matt Wolach: 19:44

And they cheer when he misses

Joe Ingram: 19:47

He misses the ball completely, but it's a blindfolded one. And so again, you're smiling because you remember, but if you look at that, right, if somebody sits there and watches it like this, because yeah, that was mean. I immediately go to the man And during go, that person's not supposed to be in sales. Good call, right? Let's go put this person in the business office, right processing the contracts doing something else, but they don't have the fortitude to recognize the humor in the situation. And if you can't recognize it in sales, right, then it's going to be horrible. And again, I'm not saying we stop and go. So did you hear about the horse that walked into the bar? That's not what I'm saying. That's not what we're doing. The answer is, can you laugh? Can you poke fun? Can you actually get somebody through laughter right at comedy shows, go to a comedy show. As soon as people start laughing, strangers are patting each other on the back. Strangers become friends, because they're so wrapped up in the laughter of what's going on and the endorphins are firing. Well get that on your sales calls. Get that going with explaining the story, you can talk to somebody? Well, let me tell you what happened, right. So I will tell you, me growing up, my dad owned gas stations my whole life. So since I was seven, I was pumping gas. It wasn't until I went to go be an electrical engineer that I didn't realize you didn't have to see every line in your hand because it was crease in it. I couldn't get it out. But I would sit there every morning go in before school for elementary school. And people used to get off and exit before the gas station from the freeway, get off, pull in and I'm thinking up gotta go pump gas. And they're like, No, beep, beep and they'd honk. And they'd yell out for my dad. And then my dad come out and they go, I need the joke of the day, I got a meeting, right? He'd give him a joke, they would go later, and they jump back on the freeway and exit down from where we were right. But all those people got their car serviced in the backroom, right? The actual mechanic shop and bought their gas there was because of that, and I looked, and I'm like, Man, humor connects all of us on levels deeper, right, and it builds a bit of bigger loyalty feeling. And that's what we're looking for within it. So I had a teacher in high school that used to play videos in the beginning of class, his His thing was, I wanted you to get there on time, because you wanted to watch the video, because he'd locked the door. And then you'd have to just listen to everybody else laughing or sit on the inside until that 10 minute video was over. But I learned that and I was like, man, everybody bonds when it comes to we're all having a humor experience.

Matt Wolach: 22:35

so true. I love that. And I think the other thing, the other lesson we can learn from your dad is humans cannot connect to a brand, a company like we don't connect with that we connect with people. That's the old build term people buy from people. And so your dad telling that joke and getting to know the customers and the customers seeing that as a person instead of this weird gas station company or whatever it right connects them to that brand through him. And that's fantastic that he did that I'm sure that that was really impactful for the business.

Joe Ingram: 23:10

Oh, absolutely. We had when he would go by another gas station and be someplace else, that as soon as I got my license, that's what I had to do was go pick up all the customers cars that were in the other city, because they still only wanted my dad where he sat. That's what they wanted. And I was like he didn't work on your car. And they're like, no, but we want him there to watch over for it because we trust him.

Matt Wolach: 23:36

So very true. Well, Joe, this is a lot of fun talking with you. Because I really resonate with a lot of what you're saying it's really insightful and helpful. I want to make sure everybody can get to know you a little bit more and learn more about how you can help them. So how best can our audience learn more about you and Ingram interactive?

Joe Ingram: 23:53

So the of course, Ingram Interactive is there. But if you go to thegenius links.com So at genius, thegeniuslinks.com, you'll find sample training, you'll find everything that I put out on the web, how to connect with me, every social media platform that I'm on, right and enough to get there. But for everybody that's listening here for you, Matt and your team, your people, let's just go down to the very bottom. Right and if I don't tell people this they don't know. But there's a down at the very bottom, there's a grayed out section, that's the same color as it but it says secret stuff. Okay, so if you go click on the secret stuff, I don't want your email. I don't want any of that stuff. It'll take you to a hidden page on my website. And on that you'll find ebooks to download. You'll find sample presentations that I've done that may help your your closing on your deals.

Matt Wolach: 24:48

So I love it giving us the secrets Joe, this is great. It's fantastic. So everybody makes sure you go back and check that out on his website. That sounds like a lot of gold. Right there. Joe, this is awesome. Thanks for coming. I didn't really appreciate you sharing all this.

Joe Ingram: 25:01

Absolutely man honor privilege to be on the show. Thank you for trusting me.

Matt Wolach: 25:05

No the honor is mine. Thank you and everybody out there. Thanks for being here. Again, make sure that you're subscribed. You don't want to miss out on other amazing nuggets from others like Joe sharing great stuff with you so you can close your deals. and Scale Your SaaS. And I appreciate you being here and we'll see you next time. Take care