About Tom Latourette: Tom Latourette has been a disciple of the M3 Learning process since 2000 when he was the VP of Sales and Marketing at SBR, Inc. With over 30 years of marketing, sales, and sales management experience, Tom can bring a unique, real-world perspective to your M3 Learning experience. His knowledgeable application of ProActive solutions can greatly impact your productivity as a sales manager or salesperson. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Tom.
In this episode, Nancy and Tom discuss the following:
- The importance of practical, bottom-line sales tools for both sales reps and managers to improve performance
- The importance of understanding what activities top performers do daily to replicate success across the team
- Challenges in managing senior salespeople and the importance of aligning their goals with their personal “why”
- Using proactive solutions, like the COD method (Cause, Outcome, Decide), to guide sales discovery calls effectively
- The value of consultative selling over feature-based selling by focusing on uncovering client needs before pitching solutions
Key Takeaways:
- One of the biggest things is that space of really understanding what creates success in your organization.
- When I’m interviewing salespeople, I watch how they handle the interview because they will interview the same way that they will sell.
- Ask a few good outcome questions and ensure you’re finding out their decision-making process.
- We’ve got to do kind of a yin and yang. Sometimes, we have to answer the question but ensure we’re flipping.
“And our answer was, well, Rich always hits his goal. That’s what A players do. That’s what high performers do. We didn’t have to worry about Rich. And he goes, “Great. Great, I get it. But let me ask you guys a question. You’re sitting here at this two-day leadership training program. We’re going to be talking about a lot of great stuff. But what’s Rich doing today? What’s he doing to make success happen 12 months from now?” And, Nancy, we couldn’t answer that question. We didn’t know. We couldn’t answer the question. Rich was already a really good salesperson. We didn’t know. We didn’t feel we could bring anything to the table for him. But what Skip helped us see was that if we couldn’t articulate what success looked like, what the steps a successful salesperson was doing daily, then as a leadership team, or even as a company, we couldn’t hire more Riches. We couldn’t coach the rest of our people to be like Rich. And maybe we were going to lose Rich because he’s watching us spend all of our time with our non-performers, trying to help them get better. Right? And that was a big moment. I remember midway through my career, I felt like my mind expanded and really got to that space of “What are things? How do I get my people to do the right things? And what are those things that they need to do? And how do we do more of them?” – TOM
“Ithink, one, you know, probably one of the biggest things we have to do a better job of as leaders, not just of salespeople but leaders of humans, as other people, is. I think sales leaders often don’t understand the “why” behind the humans we’re working with. One of the questions I like to ask sales leaders I work with is, “Tell me why this person wants to perform better. What are they striving for?” You know, the great thing about Rich was that on January 1st of every year, Rich would take a picture of what he would spend his commission check on at the end of the year. And so, one year, it was a new truck. The next year, it was a hot tub. The year after that, it was a new deck. And so, as Rich’s leader, every time I’d work with Rich, I’d go, “Hey Rich, what are we working towards today? What are we working towards this year?” And then I could get alignment on helping him achieve his goals, right? So, I think the first thing, Nancy, is we have to be better humans aligned with our people and understand their “why” better. What is it about this job? What about the goal they’re setting for themselves that is important to them? I don’t know if that makes sense, and it seems like a soft skill, but I see that too many leaders don’t know the answer to that.” – TOM
“Think about your relationship with a client much like your relationship on a first date. A first date is not about telling you how great I am; it’s about uncovering what you’re looking for. The objective of a first date is to determine if a second date makes sense. Then, after a second date, you determine if a third date makes sense, and so on, until a strong relationship is formed. One of the things we talk about is getting salespeople out of the space where they think people want to be educated. People don’t want to be educated; they want to be validated. Good discovery is about validating your needs and allowing you to be heard. I think salespeople have to get better at discovery, asking better, deeper questions, and being okay with asking before they tell.” – TOM
Connect with Tom Latourette:
- LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-latourette/
- M3 Learning: https://www.m3learning.com/
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
- Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsales
- Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/
- Website:https://oneofakindsales.com
- Phone: 908-879-2911
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/
- Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today. And it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Tom Latourette, managing partner and certified trainer of M3 Learning, a company dedicated to empowering sales professionals with practical, bottom line sales tools that help them take control of the sales process, improve performance, and drive measurable results in organizations worldwide. With over 30 years of marketing, sales, and sales management experience, Tom is able to bring a unique real world perspective to your M3 learning experience. His knowledgeable application of the proactive solutions can make a big impact on your productivity, either as a sales manager or a sales person. Welcome to the show, Tom. Let’s get started.
Tom Latourette: Nancy, thank you. First, thank you so much. Thanks for that great introduction. And yeah, I’m pleased to be here and I can’t wait to love these conversations. [1:27]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, me too, especially when I speak with other sales experts. So, you know, what really jumped out at me is you have you use practical bottom-line sales tools that are really helpful to sales reps and managers. So, can you describe what they are?
Tom Latourette: Yeah, you know, probably the best way to describe. So, I’m a little bit. I’ve been doing this for a while and probably about 21 years ago, I was the vice president of sales for a large vinyl window company. We were about a hundred-million-dollar company and one of my regional managers. So I had 50 salespeople, five regional managers. One of my regional managers read this book called Proactive Sales Management by this guy, Skip Miller. So, we hired Skip to come in. He’s going to work with our regional management team. Skip sits down. Nancy, I remember thinking, I was probably about 36, 37. We had grown sales about 25, 30 % a year. I remember thinking that this gentleman is going to be so impressed with me and my sales leadership skills. He’s going to write a chapter about me in his next book. And so, he sits us down and he says, it’s myself and my five regional managers. And he says, Hey, let me ask you, who’s your best salesperson? And we go, that’s Rich Fenlock. Rich was our number one salesperson for three years in a row. And Skip goes, great, great. Why is he your best salesperson? And Nancy, of course, you know, the answer we gave him was, well, Rich sells the most. That’s why he’s our number one salesperson. That skip was great, great, great. I get it. Let me ask you another question. How do you guys know Rich is going to hit his goal 12 months from now? And our answer was, well, Rich always hits his goal. That’s what A players do. That’s what high performers do. We didn’t have to worry about Rich. And he goes, great. Great, I get it. But let me ask you guys a question. You’re sitting here at this two -day leadership training program. We’re going to be talking about a lot of great stuff. But what’s Rich doing today? What’s he doing right now to make success happen 12 months from now? And Nancy, we couldn’t answer that question. We didn’t know. We couldn’t answer the question. Rich was already a really good salesperson. We didn’t know. We didn’t feel like we could bring anything to the table for him, but what Skip helped us see. Was that if we couldn’t articulate what success looked like, what the steps that a successful salesperson was doing on a daily basis, then as a leadership team, or even as a company, we couldn’t hire more riches. We couldn’t coach the rest of our people to be like rich. And maybe we’re going to lose rich because he’s watching us spend all of our time with our non -performers trying to help them get better. Right. And that was a big, I remember midway in my career, I felt like my mind expanded and really got to that space of what are the things, how do I get my people to do the right things and what are those things that they need to do and how do we do more of them? Does that make sense, Nancy? [4:58]
Nancy Calabrese: Absolutely. I mean, you know, the one thing that I’ve learned in sales is you want to do the activities that you can control. It’s all activity based. So that’s really interesting. So how did you then go back to this guy, Rich, and learn what he does each and every day?
Tom Latourette: What a great question. And so what we did is, I remember this, Nancy, we fly Rich in to the office. You know, he’s a high performer. We’re going to pick Rich’s brain. We’re going to, you know, we bring them in. We’re rich. We got two days. And you know, Nancy, Rich couldn’t answer that question because Rich just did it in his gut. There was that space. I mean, we see that a lot with high performers, right? They, they don’t like when you ask them to articulate what they did. It was really hard for them to do. So, what we saw, what Skip really helped us see, that a lot of times our job as leaders, our job as the manager, as Rich’s manager, wasn’t necessarily to you know, coach rich or to make him better. It was to observe what he does so that we could then replicate that throughout the rest of the organization. And so all of a sudden we started, we started, we were very purposeful about looking at, rich asks this question all the time when he’s meeting somebody for the first time, or he uses this piece of literature. He goes in and has this conversation about a feature or benefit that was important to a client. We recognize that those were things we could teach. And so, you know, that space of really helping salespeople understand what are those things that I do that are creating success or moving the ball forward? How do I keep replicating those, you know? [6:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Let me ask you this, and I think a challenge for many business owners and sales leaders, when you are dealing with a senior level salesperson, how do you manage them? A lot, in my experience, they’re not open to, not always open to be managed, that’s number one, or not always open to continue training because they feel they know it all. So, what are your thoughts on that?
Tom Latourette: Yeah, you know, I think one, you know, probably one of the biggest things we have to do a better job of as leaders of not just salespeople, but leaders of humans as other people is. I think too many times sales leaders don’t understand the why behind the humans that we’re working with. You know, one of the questions I like to ask sales leaders I work with is, tell me why this person wants to perform better. What are they striving for? You know, the great thing about Rich was on January 1st of every year, Rich would take a picture of what he was going to spend his commission check on at the end of the year. And so, one year it was a new truck. The next year it was a hot tub. The year after that it was a new deck. And so, as Rich’s leader, every time I’d work with Rich, I’d go, hey Rich, what are we working towards today? What are we working towards this year? And then I could get alignment on helping him achieve his goals, right? So, I think the first thing, Nancy, is we just have to be better humans aligned with our people and understand their why better. What is it about this job? What is it about the goal that they’re setting for themselves that is important to them? I don’t know if that makes sense and it seems like a soft skill, but I see that too many leaders don’t know the answer to that. [8:57]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay, so Tom, my experience is, and I hear this complaint time and time again from sales leaders and business owners that they just don’t, I guess, attract or recruit the right type of sales candidates that are good for the company. How important is like a cultural fit even versus who they know when you hire a producer or sales rep.
Tom Latourette: That’s a great question. Yeah, I would agree completely. I mean, I think, you know, one of the one of the biggest things is that that space of really understanding what creates success in your organization. What are the activities I need people to do? What are the behaviors? What are the how do they need to be wired? If I can articulate that powerfully, that helps me in my hiring. It helps me in my onboarding. But I think a lot of times we go a lot of leaders will go by gut and go, I like this person instead of really thinking about the science behind it. You know I’m a big fan of a lot of the tools that are available to help you maybe do some assessments things like that before but I but I also caution that you have to use those as tools and not as you know absolutes, right. I think a lot of times, sometimes the best exercise I’ve seen is you give candidates, especially people that you want to hire, give them a project, give them something. Hey, come to the next interview and pretend you’re doing a sales call and watch how they operate. They plan a sales call. In fact, if anything, especially when I’m interviewing for salespeople, watch how they handle the interview because they’re going to interview the same way that they’re going to sell and getting them out of that space of, one of the things we teach is watch for how people flip you. We call it the flip. When I answer a question, ask another question. You know, I continue the conversation. Too many salespeople have one -sided conversations and you can watch that in an interview. You can see how well somebody’s going to do that in an interview. How well do they prepare for the interview? How well do they follow up? What do they, you know, if you don’t reply to them for four or five days, what’s their follow -up structure look like? I can’t tell you how many salespeople in my career that I’ve realized have not been a good fit because they got too pushy or they didn’t get pushy enough. Does that make sense? [11:55]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, yeah, really. Let’s talk about proactive solutions. What is that?
Tom Latourette: You know, so one of the philosophies that Skip taught, so Skip Miller has written seven books. I don’t know if you knew Skip, but he passed away last year. And so it’s been, you know, an interesting space for our organization. We kind of feel like a 28 year old startup, but one of the reasons I liked Skip so much and I worked with him for 20 years was that he took a tool -based philosophy, tool -based methodology to these sales conversations. How do we help a salesperson becomes strategic in their discovery. What would a tool look like? And so, you know, a good example is one of the things that we teach is on a discovery call, you’ve got to uncover cause, outcome, and decide. We call it COD. And getting a salesperson getting really good at what’s the cause? Why are we having this conversation in the first place? What’s happening for business in your organization? And don’t just accept that first answer. You want to dive down into that. Tell me more about that. How is that impacting your business, your organization? How’s it impacting your team? You can uncover a lot before you go into, let me tell you how great we are. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So that’s call me. Then outcomes. What are the positive outcomes you need to see and what are the negative outcomes you need to avoid? And getting in a conversation about that in discovery really starts uncovering the clients’ issues and the challenges and the problems, what they can afford to overcome and what they can’t. And then lastly, that space of not just who’s making the decision, you know, too many times we see salespeople, who’s the decision maker. Instead of asking a what’s your decision-making process? How do you get how does this organization go making decisions? Those are tools that you can easily teach a salesperson and go, okay Your next discovery call, ask a few good cause questions, ask a few good outcome questions and make sure you’re finding out what their decision-making process is. And creating questions behind that then creates a place where I can become more proactive and intentional. [14:39]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, you know, you kind of touched on this a few minutes ago. What are your thoughts on these two forms of selling features and benefits and consultative selling?
Tom Latourette: Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think, yeah, one of the things that we try to caution salespeople about is, you know, too many times we walk in and the client pushes us to education. They start the conversation, hey, we’ve done all of our research. We like what you guys do. Tell us why you’re better than X or how you can help us. And we launch into, because the plan asked us, we figure our job is to answer their question. And then we talk for 40 minutes about what we can do and how we can do it. And let me show you a demo. And we jump right over discovery. We jump, the energy in that conversation is, why are we having this conversation in the first place? What’s broken? What needs to be fixed? What’s happening? And so, cause, outcome, decide. We’ve got to find out what’s the problem and what’s the size of that problem. Our belief is Nancy, I shouldn’t even be talking about features and benefits until I understand why it would be of value to you. And I can’t do that unless I operate like a consultant or a strategic partner. I need to uncover and I need to ask questions. Now, as you know, the challenge is a lot of clients push us to education. They believe that they’ve done a lot more research. And so we’ve got to do kind of a yin and yang that’s sometimes we’ve got to answer the question but make sure we’re flipping. We’ve got to give a short 30 second 45 second answer and then okay tell me more you know give me some more information. So, we have to make that a two -way conversation right? [16:41]
Nancy Calabrese: Yep. Well, it’s kind of like, you know, when you go to a doctor, they don’t diagnose you immediately. They have to ask you a lot of questions before they can offer a solution. Same thing, right?
Tom Latourette: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the problems in the answer, I was just going to say, I think what happens a lot of times too is maybe I’m, you know, if I’m a new salesperson, I’m talking to some people who maybe have been in their position or been in their industry for as long as I’ve been alive. And so, there’s a space where maybe I don’t feel confident or comfortable asking those questions. But I’ll tell you, if I could go back to my 25-30 year old self, what I would tell myself is I would say, you know, the thing I’m recognizing is it’s not so important what you say, but it’s really what I get you to say and the questions I ask so that you talk more than me. And that’s a skill that you have to teach young salesperson and young salespeople. But then Nancy, you also talked, I think the challenge with veterans is they’ve become so good at it that they want to short circuit the process instead of really doing the discovery and the uncovering that they know they need to do it. They just don’t do a good enough job of it, right? [18:10]
Nancy Calabrese: Yep. Yeah. You know, it’s the old 70 -30 % rule, right? 70 % of the time, clients should be talking. 30 % should be the sales rep. You know, I can’t believe I’m really enjoying our discussion, but we’re out of time. Let me, let’s, one more question. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience?
Tom Latourette: This has been great, Nancy. Thank you so much. Yeah.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So what’s the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with, Tom?
Tom Latourette: Yeah, probably the biggest takeaway in this conversation, I think, is, you know, think about your relationship with a client, much like your relationship on a first date. You know, a first date is really not about me telling you how great I am. It’s really about uncovering what you’re looking for. And, you know, the objective of a first date is to determine if a second date makes sense. And then after a second date, it’s the third date makes sense. And so, and on and on until a strong relationship is formed getting salespeople out of that space of one of the things we talk about is people don’t want to be educated. They want to be validated. And so that space of good discovery is validating your needs, allowing you to be heard. And so I think salespeople just have to get better at discovery, asking better, deeper questions and being okay asking before they tell. [19:57]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, love it, love it, love it. How can my people find you, Tom?
Tom Latourette: So definitely on LinkedIn, our website is m3learning .com. We’ve got a really robust community, but I’d love to connect with anybody on LinkedIn. And I answer on LinkedIn all the time. It’s probably the best way. And my email address is tom at m3learning .com. Cell phone number is 847 -528 -2738. And I just, you know, our goal is to help as many salespeople as we can and sales leaders, but this helping, you know, really feel better about those conversations. [20:42]
Nancy Calabrese: Wonderful. And by the way, Tom’s last name is spelled L A T O U R E T T E. Tom, you are fantastic. I really appreciate you spending time with me and my audience. And I hope we get to continue this conversation at another time for all you sales reps out there and leaders. He is, he’s wonderful. You really have so much wisdom. So, take advantage of his expertise and reach out to Tom. And until we meet again, make it an awesome sales day, everyone, and we’ll speak soon. [21:27]
