C-Suite Sidekick
At C Suite Sidekick, you're the Superhero CEO slaying your business challenges. We feature business advisors, your sidekicks, that help you win the day They share the tips and actionable insights you can use to scale your business and conquer challenges. From growth hacks to leadership insights, this podcast equips entrepreneurs and business leaders with actionable tools to lead smarter and grow faster. Learn from those who have been in the trenches and are winning in today’s competitive world.
C-Suite Sidekick
What to do When Everyone (including you) is on Vacation? Cheap and Easy ways you can up your game
Hello listeners! In today's mini-episode of the C-Suite Sidekick podcast, we're diving into the topic of upskilling and learning during the summer sales slowdown. Host Summer Paletti shares her insights on why continuous learning is crucial for career growth in today's rapidly evolving business landscape.
With the rise of AI and changing consumer expectations, sales professionals need to stay ahead of the curve. Summer offers eight wallet-friendly ways to invest in your education, from library cards and used bookstores to online courses and sales training programs. She emphasizes the importance of implementing your newfound knowledge and not letting the learning go to waste.
So, whether you're lounging by the pool or taking a break from the office, tune in to discover how you can make the most of your summer and set yourself up for success in your sales career. Let's dive in!
- Episode recorded and edited using Descript
- Repurposed content, such as this description created using CastMagic
- Visit Rise of Us for more information about Summer's services
- Connect with Summer on LinkedIn
Hello and welcome back. Here's another mini pod for you. This is the next in the series on B2B Summer Sales and it's got something else for you to do when everyone, including you, is on vacation. You know this one had to be coming. Learning and upskilling. Before I dive in, pun very much intended, some stuff for you to consider. I've heard from some of you that you know how to do your job, you're experienced, you have a degree, maybe also some certifications, and you don't need to do any training, and you don't have time for it. Our grandparents world, where you would go to college, get a job, and then retire from that job with a pension, it's just gone. Today's graduates, believe it or not, are going to retire from careers that don't even exist yet. How wild is that? To get us started from Forbes, they are reporting that buyers across all company sizes, purchase price, segments, generations, they are reporting using vendor sales representatives less than ever before in their research process. And this really started accelerating unsurprisingly during COVID. B2C has impacted the way consumers, especially younger generations, want to stop. They expect upfront pricing, try before you buy, reviews, self serve options on the website, and they don't want to be cold called or cold emailed. Let's pause and think about your experience with the world's largest e commerce company, Amazon, and just think about how you interact with Amazon. And a lot of people have come to expect that type of experience, regardless of where they're shopping, whether it be an e com, whether it be B2C, and also that behavior is filtering into the B2B world. And we do not have time to get into predictions on how Gen AI will affect B2B sales. However, Harvard Business Review was asking this question more than a year ago. Will Gen AI be a helpful tool or will it replace B2B sales reps altogether? Now putting this into context, if you remember early 2023 Chat, GPT was a fun little tool that we were planning around with and it wasn't able to do. Live web search. Now chat, GPT can do web searches faster than you. But without citing sources and it can write blogs for you, but they're kind of ham handed and a lot of them sound the same. It can also write really cringy sales outreach, AI chat bots also are able to give pretty generic and terrible customer service on like banking websites. So the tech's not there yet, but it will improve and it is improving quickly. Okay, let's dive into some less bleak stats from dually. ai. Nearly 70 percent of sales professionals have not received formal training in sales. Now let's pause here again. I have been in decision making roles for more than 20 years. And let me tell you, this is not a surprise to me. Companies with continuous sales training programs A coach, not a one day seminar, can expect 50, that's 5 0, 50 percent higher net per sales rep. And 84 percent of training is lost in under three months, which supports the idea that the continuous program is ideal. Okay, so what does this mean for you? If your company offers training, take it, pay attention, and apply it. If they offer credits or reimbursements, you better take advantage of that benefit. And if they don't, you are advised to get yourself some training and invest in yourself. Maybe you work a corporate job, maybe you own a business. Either way, you don't have a lot of free time between work and home. I have been there. You're busy learning your company's new offerings and handling client or employee issues. So let's bring it back to the B2B summer sales topic at hand. You technically have some free time if business is slow or if you're taking a vacation, imagine yourself learning some new skills instead of spending time complaining to your colleague about no one returning your emails or imagine yourself learning about upcoming trends while lounging at the pool instead of whatever normal people do. Is it, Read romance novels, study up for fantasy football drafts, help me out here, um. So I think you can guess which camp I'm in. The nerdiest person at the pool. Yeah, that's me. But join me. It can be fun. I've got eight things that are wallet and clock friendly for you. And of course, you can start today. Number one, get a library card. They're not just for students. I use mine all the time. They're great for classic business books. They also have audio and ebooks. You can learn while you commute, exercise, or do chores with those audio books. The library cards are free as long as you return things timely. And if you're afraid of a huge fine from high school, I hear that all the time, put on your adult pants and go down there. It's either been erased, or with your executive job, I imagine you can afford it. Number two. Get an Audible subscription starting at 7. 95 a month. It's an affordable way to access more current books. The drawback for me is that I consume more content than I can get with the subscription, so I supplement it with the library card. But it's my job to learn and it might be fine for you. Number three, along with the theme of books again, used bookstores. Not everyone hoards their business books like I do, and you can find some pretty new releases for a fraction of the price. Thrift books and Abe books are reliable sources that I use all the time. The quality is good. Prices are cheap. Shipping's fast. Highly recommend. Number four, listen to podcasts, not the murder ones. Although I consume those too. I mean, I'm a middle aged mom. So of course I do. Anyway, back to business at Tand. Look for half hour range if it's learning a new topic or 15 minute range if it's some quick action items like my mini pods. I find that podcasts, unlike books, can give you current, like, in the moment insights. I write mine the week I publish, and I know most other people do as well. Whereas books can take a couple of years to develop, edit, and publish. They also give you bite sized tidbits, and they don't overwhelm a busy exec. The learning doesn't matter much if you don't implement it, of course. Number five, online courses. These will of course take more time and education, but are great if you want to obtain a new skill that will help you advance your career, or to switch careers. edX is my go to. Coursera and Udemy are good as well. The courses on edX are free, but to give yourself an incentive to finish, consider opting for the certificate. It's amazing how much that extra little money you spent will motivate you to finish it instead of ignore it because you're too busy and it was free anyway. Pay attention to how current the information is. In rapidly evolving fields like marketing, I don't always see courses keeping up. That's why I got my DemandGen certificate from DemandBase instead of taking a marketing course from edX. And courses are very popular right now. Monetizing a skill is a trend, so buyer beware, do some research before you pay for it, read reviews, make sure the person actually knows what they're talking about and that the course looks worth your money. Number six, speaking of courses, LinkedIn Learning is a great resource for free or low cost education. I don't know that recruiters care about it much, but you can add the learning to your profile, which will at least help your LinkedIn search results. And if you're anything like most Americans, you're on LinkedIn fairly regularly anyway. While you're on there scrolling and networking, you can also do some learning as well. And number seven, community college. Now, this is going to sound a little bit weird, especially to those of you who have degrees, but it is a great way to add a skill, pretty cheap, like business management or accounting, communications. If there's something that you didn't go to school for that will help you advance your career or change careers, a certificate program from a community college can be a good cost effective way to do that. Little asterisk, again, not so great for marketing. That field is moving so fast, I find that academia is having a really hard time keeping up. And number eight, last but certainly not the least, sales training or coaching. Remember that stat that 70 percent of people haven't received any sales training? It's not taught in schools. Most companies don't invest in it. But trust me, it is worth the investment. My former company invested in sales training and it did wonders for our revenue. And my own career, frankly, that's why I do this as part of my full time work now. One or two day seminars don't work. I've tried those. People take a couple of nuggets from them and that's really all they remember. So it ends up not having as much ROI as a training program. What you want to look for is a program that focuses on one skill at a time, ideally one per week, and includes practice and reviewing of game footage such as recorded sales calls. Sales professionals and business owners can make a lot of money. So think of yourselves as corporate athletes. What you get out of your craft is directly related to the work that you put in. Sales training also isn't as expensive as it used to be. Businesses like mine can operate remotely with a low cost of operation, and that has caused some of those savings to be passed on to clients. Whew. Okay. You might be asking how you can possibly fit this into your already busy life. I got you. You pick one or two that appeal to you. Set a goal or objective related to the learning, add it to your personal success plan, and then block time in your perfect week. Now if you don't have a personal success plan and or perfect week yet, we need to chat. Those practices helped me become a high achiever without sacrificing what was most important to me. Time with my family and time to focus on my own health and well being. And remember I'm learning while I'm exercising, so that was one of my hacks. You can steal it. Before we wrap up, let's talk about implementing. All the learning in the world does not matter if you don't apply it. Feel free to let your mind wander a little bit while you're learning. Get your creative juices flowing. If you're thinking of what you could do to put it in action, you are on the right course. If your mind is thinking about that to do list that you're ignoring, you need to pick different learning material because it's not striking a chord with you and you're wasting your time. Write down your ideas or use voice memos. I do this even when I'm outside of the house. So if you ever see a blonde lady on the trail talking to herself about sales strategy, do me a favor, smile, nod, move on. I'm not crazy, I swear. Now, this is also key. Don't overwhelm yourself. Getting too many ideas can be detrimental to your overall success plan because you risk not None of them being implemented. We don't want to get into something where we're chasing a lot of different shiny objects and we have a lot of great plans but nothing ever gets finished. When you have your idea, write it down, stop learning for the day, and then sketch out ways to implement it. And if you're working with a coach, make them earn their keep. I used to subtly remind my coach what he was there for by keeping him on the phone until I had a new insight that I could use. I swear, sometimes I'm such a pain. Okay, I got my action item. You can go now. He thinks it's funny, so I guess it's fine. Okay, let's wrap it up. If you think you're experienced and educated, I bet you are. Unfortunately, that's probably not enough to sustain you for the entire length of your career. Gen AI alone is creating a need to upskill not only the current workforce, but most school aged kids. If you think you don't have enough time or money to, invest, it's also time to rethink that. Let's recap. Eight wallet friendly things that you can do to upskill yourself. One, your local library. They've got ebooks and audiobooks, too, and your fine from high school probably isn't on the books anymore. I know mine wasn't. Two, an Audible subscription. Perfect for the person who doesn't have time to sit down and read. Three, used bookstores. Perfect for the person who prefers a page book, as my daughter says, but doesn't need to get them the day they're released. Four, moving on from books now, podcasts. Perfect for the person with a commute or an exercise routine who doesn't mind being a nerd all or most of the time. Me! Five, online courses for the person who doesn't mind investing some time to gain a certificate. Buyer beware, monetizing courses is trending right now, and I personally find that the quality varies considerably. 6. LinkedIn Learning. It is full of courses or even short lessons worth checking out. You can also add it to your profile, which can help boost your search. Seven, community college. If you want to gain a new skill to advance your career or change careers, this is a great resource for some of the basics like business management, accounting, communication, some of those classics. Eight, sales training or coaching. I've seen it work in my corporate career, which is why I incorporate it into my programs. And it doesn't have to be a corporate program. Many coaches offer individual programs too. Do not be lured by one day seminars. Those simply don't stick. And none of this matters if you don't implement and use the learning. Write down or record your ideas and make a plan to implement. Try not to bite off more than you can chew, so you have my permission to pause the learning while you figure out how to implement it. And one last thing to remember, AI can only take your job if you let it. Now get out there and stay ahead of ChatGPT. I hope you found a helpful reminder in here. Let's not pretend that I just reinvented the wheel today. Share with someone who could use some encouragement or a boost, and let me know if you have any other topics you'd like to explore. You can find me on LinkedIn, I'm Summer Poletti, rhymes with spaghetti, or online at theriseofus. com. See you next week!
