Hilmon Sorey - Triangle Selling: Sales Fundamentals to Fuel Growth

Triangle Selling

Triangle Selling

Hilmon Sorey and Cory Bray

Copyright 2018 Hilmon Sorey and Cory Bray

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 9781717186621

ISBN-10: 1717186629

Acknowledgments

To my brilliant and beautiful wife, Mahsa. You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop. My everything.

Cory Bray, I am thankful for you every day. Weve just begun!

Hilmon Sorey

C ountless people have helped me get to where I am today, and for that, I am eternally grateful.

Professor Lawrence Gelburd introduced me to the power of frameworks, which are now a huge part of my life and this book. Professor Jeffrey Babin opened my eyes to entrepreneurship and taught me to look at the fish. One time he had a guest speaker who told a tale of maxing out all his credit cards to get a venture off the ground and told us never to do that because its a bad idea. I did it once and have zero regrets.

The two people who pushed me to get into sales, Dean Watkins and Jim Wilkinson, sadly passed away last year. I urge everyone to develop strong mentors and learn from those who came before you, as I did with Dean and Jim.

Great friends have helped our business in unimaginable ways, including Sam Tuley, Billy Bray, Mark Walter, Dave Hirsch, Josh Forester, and especially Chris Ray (Press the yo!).

Other mentors such as Jimmy Hickey, Andrew Hermann, Sharon Chumash, Bill Bobbora, John Martin, Southard Jones, Roger Kemper, Karl Ulrich, Steve Adelman, and Len Lodish have been amazing.

Ive quit my job without another job lined up three times in my career, with the goal of leapfrogging where I would have otherwise ended up. My parents, Bill and Ileta, have been incredibly supportive through these processes, though they havent given me a dollar since college, for which Im also grateful. If youre in your twenties or thirties and your parents pay your bills, be an adult, and cut yourself off! It makes the wins that much sweeter.

Our first two books, The Sales Enablement Playbook and Sales Development, have been successful beyond what weve anticipated. We thank everyone who has purchased a copy, and I want to give a special thanks to Ashley Gagliano, David Dulany, Joseph Fung, and David Bloom for collaborating with us on mass distribution.

Finally, I want to thank the single person who has the most significant impact on my career. Hes the best mentor, business partner, and friend a guy could have. I trust him unconditionally and am excited to see where this ride takes us. Lets go, Hilmon Sorey!

Cory Bray

Contents

W e wrote this book for CEOs who want to create repeatable success within their sales organization. If youre like the countless leaders we talk to who are frustrated by sales forecast inaccuracy, unpredictable turnover, or anemic growth, then this book is for you.

If youre not a CEO, this book will appeal to you for one of the following reasons:

Head of Sales: Improve sales team performance, reduce ramp time, minimize the amount of effort spent retraining the basics, and redirect energy away from sales 101 and toward collaborating with senior management colleagues, preparing for board meetings, coaching sales managers, and talking with customers. The most successful senior sales leaders we know have their operational house in order and focus their time on massive growth opportunities.

Frontline Sales Manager: Equip the team with the tools they need to succeed and focus on becoming a better coach. The most impactful sales management activity is coaching, but without frameworks in place, such as those we outline in this book, coaching often has no structure and therefore little credibility or impact.

Account Executive (Salesperson): Develop skills to close deals and disqualify losers fast. Salespeople are constantly asking us for resources to improve their performance beyond blog posts and books that are not directly applicable to their current role. The frameworks in this book are immediately actionable and can be used by salespeople tomorrow, even if executive management has not yet become aware of Triangle Selling.

Sales Engineer: Better define when and how presales technical resources will be leveraged to move deals forward. We continuously see teams of sales engineers and account executives failing to work well together, primarily due to the absence of much of the structure we introduce in this book.

Sales Development Rep: Learn the fundamentals critical for success in future sales roles. Simply doing well in a sales development position will not prepare someone for a closing job.

Sales Enablement or Operations Leader: Folks in these roles are often overwhelmed with projects and requests that would not exist if the sales team was running like a well-oiled machine. Implementing what is written in these pages will provide an opportunity to have an immediate impact and move from Head of Broken Things to a true senior leadership position.

Other Executive: Marketing, finance, product management, human resources, and other leaders who are a part of the sales enablement ecosystem and are looking for a way to have a more profound impact on their organization.

We have consulted with hundreds of companies in industries that range from high tech to electrical contracting and from pre-revenue startups to Fortune 500. We have delivered ongoing training to thousands of salespeople across the globe and executive coaching from the C-suite to recently promoted frontline managers. Weve been sales executives responsible for revenue goals, market share, and building high-productivity teams. This book represents the culmination of thirty years of hands-on experience cultivating success and learning from failure.

For most readers, this is not your first book on sales. We love this profession because of the ever-changing nature of products, services, and technologies. We embrace the innovations in tools and technology that allow salespeople to understand, reach, and engage their prospects. We also believe that sales is based on the application of science and fundamentals that can be learned, with developed expertise and clear application. As a result, we accepted the challenge of presenting frameworks and tactics that provide any salesperson, in any sales organization, an opportunity to do just that.

Most organizations we encounter already have one or more sales methodologies in place. The conversation we have is always Were running X methodology in the sales process, and some folks are adhering to it well; others arent using it at all. Most of our salespeople want to use it and just need some guidance or something similar.

The beauty of Triangle Selling is that it is the fundamental foundation upon which other selling systems and methodologies are built, and we are not asking that you discard what is in place today. Whether it is MEDDIC, BANT, SPIN, Challenger, Sandler, Miller Heiman, or one of the many other methodologies out there, you will find no conflict in these pages. Instead, we have endeavored to make a practical brick-by-brick foundation upon which any good sales methodology is based. With this knowledge, weve trained salespeople to become greater adherents to existing systems and more consistent top performers.