Ep. 11 Mickeli Bedore - Don't lead with friendship, lead with respect

OUTBOUND

In this episode of Outbound, host Joseph Lewin interviews Mickeli Bedore, an enterprise sales expert known for turning around underperforming sales territories. They discuss tactics and mindsets for building trust and respect with prospects to drive sales conversations and close deals. Listeners can expect to learn best practices for discovery calls, avoiding the "friend zone," and maintaining an organized sales process.

Guest Bio:
Mickeli Bedore is a top sales closer with over 20 years of experience "cleaning up" territories for companies like IBM, Oracle and Verizon. After hitting his pinnacle as a sales rep and having a child, Mickeli switched to consulting startups on developing repeatable sales processes optimized for fast revenue growth and conversions.

Key Discussion Points:

- Don't lead sales conversations trying to build friendship. Friendship is earned through respect, value and solving problems:
"One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to building relationships with your prospect is people want to lead with friendship. Friendship is earned, just like trust is." (00:02:55)

- Structure every touchpoint and call intentionally to demonstrate respect for prospects' time. Set and stick to agendas for discovery, demos, etc.
"I want to respect you and I want to respect your time so our process and how we run our entire sales process and our sales, every single sales call is almost, there's always a bit of the same redundancy so that the person knows what am I getting into?" (00:03:19)

- Act as a guide focused purely on making the deal, not trying to become actual friends. Overindexing on friendship can prevent deals from progressing.
"They expect me as their guide to show them a good time. And I think our prospects expect the same, especially when we're doing outbound." (00:03:46)

- Success comes from preparing diligently on prospects' industries, priorities and challenges - not focusing conversations on yourself or your product. Diagnose needs.
"As salespeople, it is our responsibility to be the doctor and the expert in the problem that we solve." (00:22:30)

Key Quotes:

"Friendship will come, but it shouldn't be the main focus in the beginning, I don't think." (00:06:23)

"I have to kind of put on my theater robe, I guess, and be a little bit more stern and stubborn and disciplined than I usually would be in real life because it's my job and it's my livelihood and I'm not paid to be everyone's buddy." (00:13:56)

"They only care about them. That's your baby, right? Like, nobody wants to see pictures of your baby on your phone. No matter what you think. They want to show you pictures of their baby." (00:22:38)