John Barrows

JB Sales

My "Why" is to elevate the people and profession of Sales by sharing my earned experience with anyone willing to put in the work so they can achieve whatever level of freedom and success they want in life.

I've delivered my two Signature training programs (Filling the Funnel and Driving to Close) to thousands of Sales professionals at some of the fastest growing companies in the world like Salesforce, Linkedin, Amazon, Okta, Salesloft and many others. 

My membership provides individuals and teams with live monthly training (delivered by me) along with workshops, AMAs and an OnDemand library filled with actionable tips.

None of us have all the answers and things are moving too fast right now for any of us to try and figure it all out on our own.  We need to get back to fundamentals while learning how to evolve and where to add value in this new world of AI. 

If you're willing to put in the work and want to elevate yourself, along with this profession, come join me on this ride.

No kid ever says "I want to be in sales when I grow up" and I want to change that. 

I wrote this book with my 6 year old daughter with three goals in mind:

1) Introduce the profession of Sales to kids at a young age so they see this as a viable option for them to build a meaningful career. 
2) Get more women into Sales because some of the best Sales professionals I've ever met have been women and we need more of them in this profession to combat the "bro culture" that persists.
3) Give back.  100% of the profits from this book go to my daughter's favorite charity, the World Wild Life Fund. 

Check out www.IWantToBeInSalesWhenIGrowUp.com for the background and details.

p.s. You can buy them on Amazon but if you want to get a signed copy from my daughter you can DM me and Venmo me the cash.  That way the charity gets the most money, not Amazon.

Author - I Want To Be In Sales When I Grow Up

GTMfund

Limited Partner

CloudTask

Cloudtask facilitates Sales as a Service by connecting buyers and sellers online and helping them with research, assessments and selection of the best services to fit their exact sales needs.  If you're an agency looking to provide outsourced sales services, a company looking for these services or a candidate who wants to work with some of the most progressive teams in the industry then you have to check out what CloudTask has to offer.

Advisory Board Member

Sales Community

The Jack Welch Management Institute

I worked directly with Jack and Suzy Welch on the development and execution of a Sales and Marketing strategy for their start-up online MBA program (www.JWMI.com). 

I worked with them to evaluate and test various sales strategies/approaches, developed a formal sales manual, trained existing staff, attended conferences and made direct sales calls to corporate target accounts.

VP of Global Market Development (Consultant)

Basho Technologies

Basho Technologies was a Sales training and consulting firm focused on empowering Sales professionals with the tools and techniques they need to successfully drive revenue into and through their pipelines faster and more efficiently.  

As a Director of Sales &amp; Training my role was to sell and deliver the Basho training and consult with F1000 organizations around the world.

Director of Sales & Training

Thrive Networks

Thrive Networks provides outsourced IT services to the SMB market in New England. The company grew to 85 employees in 7 years and was ultimately acquired by Staples Inc. in 2008.

As the 5th employee and VP of Sales & Marketing I worked to develop a sales process and team that drove a 30-200% yoy growth of recurring revenue services, while personally being responsible for between 30-80% of revenue closed at various times throughout our growth cycle as needed. 

Thrive achieved BBJ "Fastest Growing" and "Best Places to Work" 3 times each in 7 years.

Vice President of Sales & Marketing

Xerox

Developed, sold and implemented tailored document management solutions for State and Local Government clients and prospective clients.

Sales Executive

Black & Decker

Lead the first Event Marketing team for the DeWalt Power Tool division of Black & Decker in Boston. 

Promoted to Sales Executive for Black & Decker's Home Depot Team and managed 3rd largest territory in the country.

Sales/Event Marketing Specialist

Elevating The People & Profession of Sales

I've been selling for over 25 years and have held every role in Sales from making 400 dials a week to being the VP of Sales of a self funded start up that sold to Staples to now running my own sales training company working with organizations like Salesforce, Linkedin, Amazon, Google and many more of the fastest growing companies in the world. 

These experiences have allowed me to learn a lot along the way of what works and what doesn't work in Sales. As I continue to sell every day I continue to learn. My goal is to share these experiences with Sales professionals to help elevate them and the profession because I believe when Sales is done right it's the greatest profession in the world, but when done wrong, it's the worst.

I share this experience here on Linkedin, in my newsletter (https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter-jbsales) and through my Membership and Training: https://www.jbarrows.com/individual-training.

If there is anything I can help you with please do not hesitate to reach out to me by DMing me or filling out this form: https://20925m9y7oh.typeform.com/to/SepDz2aM

#MakeitHappen

BAHAHAHAH!!!!

I literally just got this and it's too good not to share.

When you're touting the power of your AI SDR and you can't even do a mail merge correctly you know you have some issues.....

😂🤣😂🤣😂

What's the most critical information you need to gather during a Discovery call?

There's the basic stuff like:

✔️ pain/problem
✔️ timeline
✔️ decision process and criteria
✔️ competition
✔️ budget range, etc.

But what else?

What about things like:

☑️ the impact of the problem
☑️ what other initiatives are they working on and where does this one fall on the priority list?
☑️ what's the risk of making the transition?
☑️ what's the Procurement process?

I'd love to hear what else you think is critical these days.

Regardless of what your sales methodology is or what information you need to collect during a discovery call,  Otter.ai can now listen for it and extract it from the conversation using Custom Insights.

Check out how I've configured Otter to listen for what I need to know during a discovery call below.

If you haven't checked out Otter yet, you should.  http://otter.ai/jbsales 

(and yes, they are a sponsor but only because I use them and believe it makes a difference)

Yup.  That's me.

Dancing around in a red leotard stuffed with balloons and dancing for coins. 

Why you ask?

I'm still not 100% sure.

Ian Koniak asked me to attend and speak at his Untap Your Sales Potential  retreat this past weekend.

I've known Ian for a while and saw him make the transition from being the top ENT rep at Salesforce to starting his coaching business.

I recommend anyone looking for 1:1 coaching to check out his program because it's not just about helping you become a better sales person, it's about helping you become a better person.

Ian has been through a lot in his career and talks openly about the challenges he faced with addiction, self worth and much more.

I've seen the difference he makes for others and the impact he has on their lives so I was honored to speak at his retreat in front of a group of people I know were there for all the right reasons. 

We went on hikes, did some yoga, drank some wine, talked about life (and sales) and yes, had an Olympics-style team building event with balloon relay race to stuff as many as you could into a leotard and then dance around for extra coins.  

Needless to say, I was nominated to be the anchor.

When in Rome right? :)

Let's have some fun....

Here's my schedule for the next two days:

I leave Boston on a 6:00am ET flight tomorrow morning landing in San Fran around 9:30am PT

Take an Uber to Dreamforce to pick up my badge, grab a quick bite to eat with the #Salesblazers team and then head to the SalesCloud Keynote at 1:00.

From there I have to meet with a my new partner Chili Piper to record some content at 4:00

Then dinner with my good friend Melanie Fellay 🐙 at her company Spekit 🐙's event around 5:00

Then I hand off my badge to my good friend Richard Harris™ so he and his incredible wife can check out the concert that I won't be able to attend because....

I need to then go directly back to the airport to take the redye back to Boston so I can go to another conference (that I legally can't say the name of.)

I'll be signing and handing out copies of the book I wrote with my daughter, I Want To Be In Sales When I Grow Up, (https://lnkd.in/e92XvzW) at 3:00pm at another one of my new favorite partner's (Otter.ai) booth who were generous enough to buy the books for everyone with all the money going to my daughter's favorite charity World Wildlife Fund. 

Then I need to head back home to jump in the car and go to my daughter's new High School event where we get to meet all her teachers for the first time which is more important than any of that other stuff. 

With all that chaos, and the fact that more than a few people have DM'ed me about wanting to meet up (humble brag, I know...), I thought we could have some fun.

I have 25 of these Make It Happen Coins.  I'll give the first 25 people who find me and reference this post one of the coins and a 30 minute call with me sometime in the future to talk about whatever you want (sales, business, mental health, life, whatever).

All you have to do is find me and take a picture to post on social.

Who's in?

by the way, I'll be documenting the entire journey on Instagram stories if you want to ride along with me. (@JohnMBarrows)

see you tomorrow

Can someone help me understand how the big platforms (Salesforce, Microsoft, Hubspot, etc) aren't going to be the ultimate winners in the AI race?

Before AI, these big platforms would try to build features into their platforms that were never as good as the individual point solution vendors or they would buy the individual point solutions and poorly integrate them into their platform.  

Before AI, money was free and there was a grow at all cost mentality in SaaS so people didn't mind investing in multiple tech platforms that all did similar stuff but were better in specific areas 

Think Gong and Salesloft in the early days when Gong's call recorder was better than what Salesloft had but Salesloft had the cadence tool so companies would invest in both.

Now that money isn't free, companies are consolidating their tech stacks and   the big companies are using their own AI to either create features or integrate better and faster than ever before I'm having a hard time seeing how any point solution is going to survive. 

This is a genuine concern I have and question I am asking and would love anyone's thoughts on this.

It’s time to level up!

What I saw last week at Dreamforce was eye opening to say the least.

Their AI Sales Agents are going to make certain reps unstoppable……

IF....

.....they have strong Sales Fundamentals, Business Acumen and are Agile enough to adapt. 
 
What skills do you think will be necessary to survive in the world of AI?

Learn more here: https://sforce.co/3BiQsva

Salesforce Sales Cloud #SalesforcePartner #salesblazer #DF24

Here at the LinkedIn Sales Connect in NYC hanging out with some of my favorite people (Morgan J Ingram and Lindsey Boggs ☕️ 😁) listening to Matt Dixon talk about the data and findings in The JOLT Effect and the future of Sales.

Do you know Zapier?

If you don't know them, you should.  They connect and power the back end of almost every process you can think of.

If you do know them, have you seen what they've been up to lately?

Their new Salesforce integration gives your team real-time product data, support tickets, and deal insights, all delivered automatically, with zero effort on your part.

Join Matt Brown and Danielle Lapierre tomorrow at 2:00pm ET as they take a deep dive into how you can use AI to automate key insights directly into Salesforce. 

(yes, this is a sponsored post but as always, I NEVER partner with a company I don't truly believe in or use myself)

I'm heading off to Dreamforce tomorrow morning for my 10th year running!

One of the main reasons I’m going out this year is to check out how Salesforce is evolving with AI.

There’s a lot of hype out there about AI and only a few companies are doing it right.  From what I’ve seen so far about Sales Cloud and their AI capabilities, they’re doing it right.

Sales reps aren’t going to get replaced by AI, they’re going to get replaced by other sales reps who learn how to use AI, like Sales Cloud.

What’s your favorite use case for AI right now and what impact does it have on results?

#SalesforcePartner #salesblazer #DF24 Salesforce Sales Cloud
https://sforce.co/3Zs1oRj

You're not alone.

I did a video post with that message a few months ago after I spoke with a few friends and colleagues and was shocked to hear how they felt like they were the only ones struggling right now.

It amazing that so many people think that so many other people have it all together and judge themselves because of it.

When you realize that NO ONE has all their sh-t together life becomes a lot easier to manage.

Don't take my word for it, listen to what Rupal Patel has to say on the topic.

She's an ex-CIA officer, two-time CEO, international speaker, best-selling author, crisis leadership expert, executive advisor, investor, philanthropist, and one of the most influential women of 2023.

By the way, I had imposter syndrome just typing that last paragraph.....

Where are the future sales reps going to come from?

I've been struggling with this question quite a bit recently, especially after seeing the AI upgrades that some of the major platforms are releasing.

These AI agents are incredible.  

They do the research for you and help write personalized emails, they prep for meetings with insights and questions to ask, they role play to practice objection handling, record the call, update CRM, provide coaching after and much more. 

This is all fantastic, especially for experienced reps who have strong sales fundamentals and business acumen.

Experienced reps can put all the information and insights provided by AI into context and use it to have a high value business conversation with a client.

But what about new reps who don't have strong sales fundamentals, business acumen or the ability to have a deep, value oriented conversation with a buyer?

AI can serve up talking points, questions to ask and ways to handle objections but if a rep doesn't know how to use the information or understand the "why" behind those talking points and questions then they're not going to get very far. 

For instance, let's assume the AI writes a killer personalized email that gets a meeting with an interested buyer.  Then it helps the rep prep for the meeting by analyzing the client's 10k and extracting insights and comes up with really insightful questions.

Now, the rep get into the meeting and asks the super insightful question which gets the buyer engaged and wanting to talk in more detail but the rep can't go much deeper. 

As soon as the client figures out the rep has limited depth/knowledge and is basically reading off questions that AI generated the conversation will most likely be over. 

Why wouldn't the buyer want to talk directly to the AI bot if all the rep is going to do is regurgitate what it is saying anyway? 

I know this has been an issue we've dealt with forever, especially with the advent of the Predictable Revenue model and the segmentation of roles. 

Junior SDRs/BDRs get into conversations all the time that they can't manage and therefor hand it off to the AE.

However, it hasn't been until recently that the client can get deep insights into a product or service by using AI.

With that, where are the fundamentals going to come from for the younger generation of sales so they can manage those conversations when the client can get better information from the AI?

We used to be able to our teeth in sales by meeting with clients in person because that was one of the only ways clients could get the real information about our solutions.

Also, when you met someone in person you could literally feel and see how the client was reacting to your approach and make adjustments.

Now that AI can give better answers than almost any junior rep (or senior rep for that matter) and almost all sales are virtual, I'll ask again - where will all the new sales reps come from and how will they learn the fundamentals?

I had the honor of speaking at 🎙 Elyse Archer's She Sells event yesterday with a group of incredible women who are looking to take that Quantum Leap in their lives and business.

We talked about the alignment of you "Why," Vision, Values and Energy and shared a bunch of fun stories along the way.

Aligning your priorities with what GIVES you energy was the highlight. 

It's always great to be around a group of people that you can tell truly care about their own personal and professional development while helping others along the way. 

I'm now off to Ian Koniak's retreat this weekend to have a similar conversation with his crew and expand on the keynote I've done about the "Continuous Growth Mindset" 

You can't not be motivated to do great things when you're around people who are motivated to do great things.

Have you ever wondered why $19.99 sells better than $20.00?

Me too. 

So, I got pricing expert Dan Balcauski from Product Tranquility on this week's episode of Make it Happen Monday to talk about it and much more. 

We discussed pricing strategies for SaaS, the power or transparency, how to justify SaaS pricing as a rep, the different between the "freemium" model versus PLG and what roles are most in jeopardy with the PLG approach many company's are using now. 

Check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.

TRUST....IS.....EVERYTHING!

The more I grow and learn in business, the more I realize how important trust is.

Specifically trust in others and trust in yourself  

Trusting the wrong people and/or not trusting yourself leads to failure more often than not in my experience. 

Melanie Fellay 🐙 and I have both struggled with both components of trust while we build and rebuild our respective businesses which is why I wanted to have her back on the Make it Happen Monday podcast to talk about it.

How important do you think trust is when it comes to building a business (or anything else for that matter)?

More importantly, how do you gauge trust?

What’s your definition of a “Champion” in the Sales process?

There are Fans, Coaches and Champions throughout any sales process. 

Fans are people who love your solution, usually end users, but have very little impact on the decision.

Coaches are people who can give you insights and tell you who need to talk to but again, have limited influence on the decision.

You usually hear things from Coaches like “you didn’t hear it from me but….”

Thanks for the info but if we can”t really use it then it’s not that valuable.

Champions are what we all strive to develop. The problem is most of the time, the phrase “Champion” is rarely defined.

Most reps confuse Coaches and Fans for Champions. 

I actually think that “Champion” is one of the most overused phrases in sales (“touching base” and “checking in” are 1 and 2).

It makes us feel good to say that we have a Champion but how do we know they actually are if we haven’t defined what it means to be a Champion?

I’m guessing everyone will have slightly different characteristics and definitions, but regardless, make sure you work with your team to define what a Champion means for you so you know what you’re talking about when you use the phrase. 

For those of you who have a clear definition, let me know what it is in the comments so we can help those who don’t. 

I’ll start:

1️⃣. They do not have to be the final decision maker but they have to be “sitting at the table” when the decision is being made.

2️⃣. They break the “rules” to get things done

3️⃣. 

4️⃣.

5️⃣.

Where are you with AI generated content?

I'll tell you where I am (at least for right now).

If I know it's AI generated then I'm fine with it 

BUT....

If someone uses AI to generate a post and pretends like they did it themselves I immediate discredit the content regardless of how valuable it is.

It's kind of like when chatbot first started being used on websites.  

The first 2-3 chats were super impressive, especially since it seemed to be and acted like a human. 

However, after 3+ chats it was evident that it wasn't a human and then I would get annoyed and discredit the value of what it was doing even if it was better than a human could do. 

It wasn't until Drift came out with their chatbot that identified itself as a robot upfront where I was then "impressed" and willing enough to engage with it further.

It's the same with posts and other content for me right now.  

If I know it was AI generated then I'm curious to see what it came up with BUT if I even get a wiff that is was AI generated but the "author" pretends like they wrote it, I stop reading almost immediately.

I got into this topic and much more with Everett Berry, Head of GTM Engineering at Clay, on this week's episode of the Make it Happen Monday podcast.

Take a listen and let us know what your thoughts on the matter are.

I train sales pros to win more business by selling authentically | LinkedIn Top Sales Voice + Insider | Check out my course in the featured section

How much time do you spend researching accounts to find information you can use to personalize your outreach efforts? 

I used to spend 10-15 minutes researching every Tier1 account I wanted to  prospect into to find "triggers" I could use to personalize my outreach with.

Now, it get more information than I ever did in seconds with one cut/paste into a Clay table. 

I showed it in a post I did a few months ago about "How I prospect into my tier1 accounts" and now they've build a dedicated table for it that you can set up for yourself. 

Check out the details of how you can automate your research and much more: https://lnkd.in/d7i9pRJu

Is anyone else seeing a rise in unsolicited meeting invites showing up on their calendars?

I'm not getting very many from sales reps (yet), but I'm getting a bunch for webinars and events and its driving me crazy.

What are your thoughts on this approach?

I've been searching for answers recently on where the future sales reps are going to come from.

Will Barron came on the podcast to share his views and more. 

I've known Will since he first started his original podcast with no sales experience and grew it to one of the largest (if not the largest) sales podcast in the industry.

Needless to say, he's talked to a lot of sales professionals and other influential leaders in the industry.  

Check out the clip below and let us know what you think.

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