Jack Knight Of CallBlitz On The 5 Most Effective Sales Techniques Leaders Need to Know

An Interview with Rachel Kline

Focus on building trust with your reps. Make sure they know you are bought in on their development, in the role, and beyond the role. The more passion you put into them, the more performance you will get out of them.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, sales leaders are constantly seeking new and innovative ways to engage prospects, close deals, and exceed targets. Mastering effective sales techniques can be the key to unlocking greater success for both individual sales professionals and organizations. But with countless methods and strategies available, how can sales leaders identify the most effective techniques to drive results and enhance their team’s performance? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders. sales professionals, trainers, coaches, and thought leaders to explore “The 5 Most Effective Sales Techniques Leaders Need to Know.” As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jack Knight.

Jack Knight is a Global Business Development leader overseeing a team of 13 software Sales reps across 3 different countries. With a heart for people, servant leadership, and desire to invest in the development and success of his team, he founded CallBlitz, a virtual salesfloor that allows remote sales teams to connect just like they would if they were in an office together, for better coaching, training, and support in the Sales role.

Thank you for doing this with us! Before we begin, our readers would like to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path?

At 19 years old I was in a jail cell. I had been battling 5 years of drug addiction, dropped out of college twice, and ultimately ran my life into the ground. I had no understanding of my potential, no sense of purpose, and had turned away everybody who was trying to help me walk a straight path. In that jail cell, I had an encounter with Jesus Christ, who radically changed my life, and gave me a brand new start with new focus, new opportunity, and new adventure.

Part of my recovery included mentors reaching out to help me figure out what was next. One of those mentors was a VP at a Software Sales company. He encouraged me to explore Sales as a career path. Although I was hesitant, because my perception of Sales was sketchy used car salesmen and boiler-room pressure to perform, I trusted him and went for it. My first role as a Sales rep was challenging but incredibly rewarding. That success led to an opportunity to lead the Sales team I was part of in a formal leadership role. I fell in love with leading teams, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Growing up, I was always told I was a leader, but the decision I would have to make is which way am I going to lead people. For most of my life, I led people down a destructive and empty path. Now, I get to lead them toward a path of growth and development, helping them see and fulfill their potential, an understanding that changed my life forever.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that has occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or takeaway you took from that story?

I got chewed out by one of my teammates in my first Sales role. In Sales, the end of a fiscal quarter is always the most important time for sales reps to close business and get contracts signed. This teammate was someone who I technically reported to, my job was to book them sales appointments so they can develop sales opportunities, and I get paid for how many of those future opportunities I bring to them.

But, being the end of the quarter, this teammate was laser focused on getting the deals they had in-flight closed, rather than worrying about potential deals that wouldn’t develop until weeks or months later. I was so focused on my paycheck, that I blew this teammate up over multiple channels of communication, Slack, text, and email. I heard no reply for a few days and could tell I was getting the cold shoulder.

A week later, my teammate and I finally reconnect, and while getting railed for badgering this teammate for a response, they explained to me that they had been heads-down trying to close a multi-million dollar deal before the quarter ended. They had to ignore me, and that deal was 100x more important than the potential opportunities I was so concerned about.

It was then I learned that the world doesn’t revolve around me, and I needed to put the team’s needs before my own. Very humbling.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

My heart for Sales reps led to the creation of CallBlitz, a tool designed to help cold callers connect virtually with their remote teams, Cold calling is miserable, however, it’s effective, and an essential method of outreach for B2B Sales. Traditionally, Sales teams that cold call gather together in person to call together. This makes cold calling more fun because you have a team around you to hype you up and compete with each other, but it also makes you a more effective caller, because you are going to get live feedback and coaching on how to improve your cold calls. Remote teams do not have this luxury. They have no way to cold call together, so Sales reps end up sitting home alone in their home offices anxious, isolated, and dreading picking up the phone. CallBlitz is a virtual salesfloor that allows Sales teams to connect just like they would if they were in an office together, and rather than cold calling being something Sales reps dread, CallBlitz makes cold calling fun, because Sales is a team sport, and with your team, you can accomplish anything!

For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about your experience with sales? Can you share an anecdote or two that illustrates your experience in this area?

In my first Sales role, I was placed on an incredible team of sellers. They were supportive and encouraging, but also saw my potential, and challenged me to push myself beyond my limits. With the support of my team, I was able to source the most pipeline and opportunities for our business segment at the time and was named the #1 Sales rep across the globe within our company. An honor for sure, but it was not by my own doing, my teammates were incredible.

How do you approach developing a sales pitch that resonates with potential customers and sets you apart from the competition?

Be human and interrupt the pattern. Potential customers hear the exact same pitches every single day. They either hear the terrible pitches where Sales reps are annoying, pushy, or so anxious they can hardly speak. Or, they hear the pitch that is so scripted and calculated that it sounds like a robot is on the other end of the line. In either case, someone can sense a Sales rep from a mile away, We call it “commission breath” — and the goal is to steer clear of commission breath.

You can do that by simply being human. Chuckle on the phone, use self-depracting humor, and talk to the potential customer as if you were meeting someone new at a bar. Keep it relaxed, keep it casual. Afterall, they are a human being just like you are.

Also, break the pattern. As soon as a Sales rep starts talking and a potential customer recognizes it’s a sales pitch, a switch flips in their brains that tells them to be defensive and resist. So, the best way to open a conversation with a potential customer is to do it completely differently than how every other Sales rep is doing it. Try new things, get creative, but be different.

When selling to different types of customers such as small businesses versus large enterprises, how do you differentiate your sales approach?

You need to match their tone and vibe. Small businesses are laid back and can get dodgy if you approach them with too much formality or polish. Learn why the founder started the business, and tap into that very deep and emotional purpose, that will help you connect with that potential customer in an authentic and human way.

Large enterprises are much more about business outcomes. This doesn’t mean you enter “formal robot mode”, not at all, be human, be real. But, it does mean you need to present yourself as knowledgeable about the enterprise, its goals, initiatives, and priorities for the year, and connect your value proposition directly to those goals.

How do you handle objections during the sales process, and what tactics have you found to be most successful in overcoming them?

The great thing about objections is there is only a handful of them. In fact, because most Sales interactions end in the same couple of ways, you can easily outline all of the potential objections you will encounter, or have encountered, and practice your responses to them. Practice them in the mirror, in the shower, and burn your responses to objections into your brain so that when they are brought up, you can handle them with grace and confidence.

Success in objection handling is counterintuitive. When prospects are pushing back via objections, we think we have to “battle” or “overcome” them. However, this is going on the offense when the prospect is on the defensive already. Not a good idea. Instead, we want to “defuse” objections, and we do that not by pushing back and telling a prospect why they are wrong, but by actually validating their feelings, telling them you understand their concerns or point of view, and then asking them a compelling question that might open their eyes to a possible solution outside of their current state. The key is to ask them so they can have the realization themselves, rather than tell them why your solution is superior. And the most important thing is tone — a calm, empathetic tone is crucial to defusing any objection you encounter.

Can you share a time when you failed to close a deal despite your best efforts, and what you learned from the experience?

To get CallBlitz started, we opened the platform up for free and were able to get a few Sales teams, about 5, to come aboard as alpha testers. These alpha testers were awesome, they gave us a ton of feedback, loved the product, and even evangelized for us within their own circles. I thought all of them were going to sign up once we put together a formal paid plan.

Fast forward a few months later, we were ready to commercialize the product, and we informed our alpha testers that we’d be asking them for payment soon, but as a thank you for their early support, we’d give them 50% off of the regular price.

3/5 of these alpha testers never signed up. I was so confused. I thought they loved it, they were consistent users, and even though the product wasn’t perfect and had its hiccups, we hadn’t heard many complaints from them.

However, once we put a price tag on the product, we realized that while they enjoyed the product, it wasn’t enough of a need for them to actually invest money into it.

This taught me that when handling any Sales opportunity, it’s extremely important to be transparent about pricing and bring it up early in the deal cycle, that way you don’t spend too much time developing a business opportunity only to find out that they aren’t willing to pay for the product once all is said and done.

What metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of your sales techniques, and how do you identify areas for improvement?

Ultimately, the only metric that matters in Sales is the output metric, whether that is new business opportunities sourced for Sales Development representatives, or closed won revenue for full-cycle Sales reps.

But, you don’t get to the output without paying close attention to the inputs. In fact, with quality inputs, outputs are guaranteed to come as a result.

Inputs can look different depending on which Sales role someone is in, but common ones include, emails sent, calls made, and replies to outreach.

The best way to measure effectiveness is to break all of those inputs down into conversion rates, or percentages.

Example: if you email 100 people and get 10 replies, you have a 10% reply rate. Out of those 10 replies, you source 4 new business opportunities, giving you a 40% meeting booked rate. Out of the 4 meetings you booked, 3 show up to the Sales presentation, giving you a 75% show rate.

In the scenario above, because the show rate and meeting booked rates are pretty solid, it would be better to focus on increasing email reply rates, because if we can get more replies, we can book more meetings.

This is a micro-example, but an example nonetheless of how breaking Sales inputs down into conversion rates can help Sales reps identify what to focus on and improve to have the biggest ROI and impact on results.

What role does technology or AI play in the sales process, and how do you leverage it to enhance your or your team’s sales performance?

Technology is essential to high Sales performance, which explains why every single modern Sales organization invests thousands, sometimes millions, into best-in-class technology. Technology enables automation to increase efficiency, and visibility into performance for coaching and tracking. AI is in its infancy and will have a significant impact on the entire world, not just Sales, but the technology is still too immature to impact Sales the way we know it can and will. A lot of Sales teams are using AI to help develop their messaging, which is a cool concept, but in reality, humans can out-write robots any day of the week (at this point, that could change). One of the better ways to use AI in Sales is to help source new prospects and business opportunities. Example: you can tell AI to pull a list of any prospect in a specific geographic area that may have a need for your solution. You can then have AI analyze those prospects and their companies to see if there are any recent news or compelling events that you can target to help you in your outreach. The potential for AI in Sales is massive, but for now, AI is mostly an efficiency gain, but those that harness it and invent new ways to use it within the context of Sales will absolutely win.

Here is the main question of our interview. In your experience, what are the “5 Most Effective Sales Techniques Leaders Need to Know”?

1 . Whatever technique you use, keep it simple. Your reps are overwhelmed with tools, distractions, and to-do’s, keeping processes simple is a technique in itself!

2. Focus on building trust with your reps. Make sure they know you are bought in on their development, in the role, and beyond the role. The more passion you put into them, the more performance you will get out of them.

3. Coaches need to be coached on how to coach. Leaders assume hiring coaches and managers means that coaching is taking place. In many cases, coaching is one of the last things on a manager’s priority list, because of the 100 other fires they are putting out. Your coaches will be more likely to coach if they’ve been taught how to coach, and are held accountable to some frequency of regular coaching.

4. Don’t fight AI. Use AI to your advantage and embrace it. Encourage your reps to think outside of the box and get creative with how they can leverage AI, whether it be in their messaging, prospecting, or processes.

5. Cold calling is not dead. Don’t believe the hype and abandon the fundamentals. AI has not replaced cold calling in terms of effective methods of sourcing pipeline and revenue, and it won’t. AI cannot get into live conversations with potential buyers and handle human conversations the way humans can. Cold calling works, and always will. So, lean in, and don’t let your team shy away from the phones using the excuse of AI.

We’d love to know, what is the most effective sales technique you’ve used to close a deal, and how did you come up with it?

The most effective sales technique I’ve seen and used to close deals is to be incredibly transparent and to make the expectations clear upfront regarding the stages of the deal, the cost, who needs to be involved, and how implementation will work.

This clarity gives the prospect a lot of confidence that you’ve done this before and you will take the burden from them of trying to get the platform purchased and implemented. They have too much on their plate, they don’t need to be worried about how to close your deal for you, and you don’t want them to have that power anyway.

It will also unearth any landmines that you may not have discovered up to that point. Maybe the prospect doesn’t have decision-making authority, maybe they don’t have budget, maybe they have concerns about implementation, and the list goes on. Laying out a clear path with the prospect gives them a chance to voice their concerns, telling you what landmines to expect and protecting you from getting weeks into a deal cycle only for it to fall apart.

We are nearly done. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I understand this view may not be welcomed, and I respect everyone’s views on faith and spirituality, but Jesus changed my life. Not religion, not trying to be a good person, not even going to church on Sunday, but having a real and authentic relationship with Jesus, where he knows all of me, the good, the bad, and the ugly.. If he can change my life as a 5-year drug addict in a jail cell, he can certainly transform yours.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Hit me up on LinkedIn or check out our blog or media page! Always down to talk shop and see where I can help out!

Thank you for the interview. We wish you only continued success!