113 Authenticity and Building Relationships in Sales – with Larry Levine

“You don’t become successful overnight. It was a series of small steps that you did on a consistent daily basis that got you to where you’re at today.”

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Larry Levine is the international best-selling author of Selling From the Heart and the co-host of the Selling From the Heart Podcast. With 30 years of in-the-field sales experience within the B2B technology space, he knows what it takes to be a successful sales professional.

Now Larry coaches B2B sales professionals to do what he did. Since 2015 Larry has coached both quota-busting tenured reps and green millennials just beginning their careers. Both appreciate the practical nature of his coaching.

Read Larry's Full Bio

In this episode, we talk about:

Building culture within a sales organization
Being your authentic self
The “spray and pray” technique (and why it’s outdated)
Building relationships in sales
Having a non-pretentious voice in social media
Growing as a sales person

Authenticity has become a rare commodity in the sales industry. However, it is a much needed element to help you connect with people and with yourself. If you want more nuggets about authenticity and building relationships, give this episode a listen!

Problem Among Sales Professionals Today

I think the problem exists in multiple levels. I’ll poke holes and throw darts at the individual salespeople across the board, that they’ve got to own up the responsibility of growing themselves and being leaders and lead themselves, and hold themselves accountable and grow their business, grow themselves and all that.

There’s a certain aspect they’ve got to throw on them. There’s also equally as much poking holes and throwing darts at management and upper management because they’ve allowed it to happen. And it’s all of this put together and I think it’s unfair for anybody to say it’s all the sales individual’s fault, that it’s all management fault, that it’s all the upper management’s fault or it’s the CEO’s fault.

It’s collectively everybody’s fault because they’ve allowed it to happen for such a long time that now, we’re faced with “Okay, now what do we do,” and everyone’s grasping at straws to help turn themselves around.

The Power of Consistency

There are successful businesses, sales leaders and sales individuals all over the place.

But I said, listen, you don’t become successful overnight. It was a series of small steps that you did on a consistent, daily basis that got you to where you’re at today.

And most people are going to go, “Of course,” and so I said, okay, then let’s flip this on its head.

And I go, oh, if we understand that there’s issues out there, that we all can improve, it didn’t happen overnight. It was a series of inconsistent steps that we did on a daily basis, and that’s why we’re here. So we can’t fix these things overnight. It’s going to be a series of small steps you do every single day that you hold yourself as a sales person, a sales leader, an executive, to non-negotiable things that I must do, and that’s my challenge to people.

Larry’s thoughts on “spray and pray”

The spray and pray in sales, it’s just unfortunate but that’s what I tell people. If you just take a step back and you humanize this – it’s that age old saying, right, “Don’t do unto others that you wish not done to you”? Isn’t it true? And this stuff is not complicated. And the funny thing is, I always ask people, let’s flip it on its head.

You’re not a salesperson now, you’re the person in the other shoes. If you started seeing all this, what would you do? And then there’s dead silence because they know.