Jen Allen-Knuth: So instead of going in and saying, Hey, let me ask a couple of surface level questions about your needs and then jumping to demo, I spend far more time now slowing down the customer in many cases to say, before we get on this path, let's make sure you actually have a valid argument for change for yourself and for your business.

So I'm often met. With open arms with that, if we slow down, help the prospect size, the cost of an action to begin with, then it actually in my experience has sped up the remainder of the sales process.

Tracy Young: Hi, welcome to Path to Growth. I'm Tracy Young, co founder and CEO of TigerEye. Today, we are joined by Jen Allen-Knuth, founder of Demand Jen.

Welcome.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Thank you so much. I'm excited to be with you.

Tracy Young: So to start, tell me about growing up. Tell me what you learned from mom and dad.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Oh boy, mom and dad. Dad never finished high school, was a construction worker his entire life, which meant a very different job and path for me and mom never went to college.

She was an insurance agent, both of them extremely hard workers. So growing up, I modeled after them. I always believed that the more hard work I put in, the more likely I was to be successful. And so I feel really lucky to have grown up in that. Obviously my career path is very different from my parents, but I think one of the reasons I'm able to have my own business and I was successful in sales is because of what I learned from them about just working hard, no matter the circumstance.

Tracy Young: I think construction people... I spent five years in the field. That was my first job out of university as a construction engineer. I feel that construction people are actually really good at building relationships, because you're just working next to people all the time. And the best leaders are just these incredibly empathetic and obviously smart builders.

But people is what they excel at. And I felt like I'd learned so much in my five years in the field from them.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yeah. Also, the other thing they're really good at is It's making decisions in a moment's notice. So there were so many stories my dad would come home and tell me where they were doing demolition and they hit the button to blow it up and something went horribly wrong and you had to pivot in the moment.

And so I think, to some extent, learning how he handled those situations was also really helpful too. what do you do when everything goes wrong and the consequences of those things going wrong are pretty significant.

Tracy Young: Yeah, it's fascinating. You bring up decision making and quick decision making because one of the best lessons I've learned from my superintendent at the time, and this is over like 15 years ago, I remember being just stuck on some problem.

I don't even remember what the problem was. Like some something was getting delivered late. I don't know. It was like the work was impacted. The schedule is going to be delayed. And he said, Tracy, just make a decision. We can't just sit here and wait. You just have to make a decision. If it's the wrong one, you can make another decision tomorrow, but we've got to move.

And, that hit me like a ton of bricks and I never forgot that.

Jen Allen-Knuth: I've got to imagine that's got to be one of the most important criteria or skills or whatever we want to call it. If you're running a business, you cannot afford to sit there and be like, what are all of my options? And what are all the pros and cons?

Of course, we've got to do some level of thinking, but doing that quickly and getting to an outcome, it's something I've always appreciated in leaders I've worked for. There's rarely, I would think, a right answer and a wrong answer. And so getting to that quickly is something I admire in leaders I work for.

Tracy Young: Can you share your journey into sales and what you've learned over the last almost two decades in the industry?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yeah, I can share some of it. Otherwise we'd be here on here all day long because I didn't know anything when I started like most of us in sales. I think like a lot of people in sales, I did not grow up as a little kid thinking like I can't wait to be a sales rep. In fact, sales as a profession honestly sounded really icky to me because I thought about all of the experiences I knew of as a kid growing up, like going to a car dealership and feeling pressured, watching my family feel pressured to buy something or going to the mall and walking past those people in mall kiosks who were like trying to catch your attention.

I'm like, I don't want any part of that. That seems very icky to me. Like most of us, I ended up after college. Not really knowing what I wanted to do. I had a roommate who worked for this company, Corporate Executive Board. She called me and said, listen, you've got to move to D. C. You've got to join this business.

It's just a ton of really smart people. It's a really fun culture. Still not entirely sure what we do here, but I know I love it and I work for great leaders and have great peers. And that was enough for me to say get me out of Central Pennsylvania. So I started at CEB in 2004, and then essentially stayed at the same company for 18 years.

So the company was acquired by Gartner, so I technically worked for Gartner for a bit, and then Gartner spun off the division I worked for, which was the Challenger Sale Division. And so technically it was three different companies, but there's people I worked with those entire 18 years. And the reason I stayed is because I was so clueless of how to sell.

And so every year, if I ever had that thought creeping around in January of should I leave, I always just felt like there's so much more for me to learn. So I think one of the biggest learnings, if I look back across those 18 years, is I don't think we ever become experts in sales because it is almost impossible to become an expert at something when that thing is constantly changing and for me in sales, the thing that keeps changing is the buyer, the environment, the economic circumstances. So just because if I crushed it in sales in 2007 did not mean I crushed it in 2008. And in fact I didn't. And so I think it was that idea that there was always something else to learn that kept me sticking around in sales so much.

Tracy Young: And you're right, your accounts changes every year, the buyers are different, the products different, the world is different, and it's all dynamic. You've positioned yourself as the non motivational speaker, being on your wedge in a crowded space of SKO speakers. Tell us more about that.

Jen Allen-Knuth: So I am not a typical sales kickoff speaker, meaning I don't have a book.

I've never been a CRO. I've never climbed Mount Everest. I just don't look like most other sales kickoff speakers. And I think like most of us, it's easy to get a little bit of imposter syndrome when we enter into a space where we think I'm not like everybody else. And so I was really intentional about saying I'm never going to be like someone who sold a million copies of a book.

I'm never going to be like someone. Who ran a sales organization with a thousand salespeople. What I can show up and own is that I was just like you in the audience. I was someone who sat through 18 of these. Some were good, some are bad. And the thing that stood out to me was motivational speakers. Feel cool in the moment like who doesn't love hearing a story where someone overcame something and then achieved their end result like that is cool.

But when I left those sales kickoffs and I went back to doing my jobs to be done, I'm like, okay, but how do I apply hiking Mount Everest to writing a cold email like I never. Where I felt like there was a gap was it didn't actually help me do the job to be done. It fired me up, but I felt like there was a missing link as to what I needed and what I was seeking out of a sales kickoff.

And so that's essentially what I owned and then said, listen I'm not saying motivational speakers are wrong. If you've got an effort problem, bring in a motivational speaker. But when I look at a lot of sales organizations today, I see a lot of effort being exerted. But the missing gap for me is is it effort on the right things?

Cause I personally believe that. Effort alone is not enough to be successful in sales. It's a critical ingredient, but there's so much more. So I take much more of a position of, we have to empower people with ideas that work for today's buyers. And that's how I think we should be using airtime in many cases at sales kickoffs.

Tracy Young: What made you go and start Dimansion?

Jen Allen-Knuth: First of all, I chickened out, which I think a lot of people don't know, even though I talk about it a lot. When I left the challenger business in December, 2022, that was a really tough decision, right? I had spent basically my entire career there and I left because I had started in that year.

I became the chief evangelist, which meant I was doing a ton of keynotes and customer presentations and teaching. And I started to realize how much I loved that. So December, I left. And it's scary. It's scary. When you pull the rug out and you no longer have a salary, you're paying for health insurance out of pocket.

And so I had an offer from a company named Lavender, who I had used as a salesperson, really loved the founder, and I took it because I was like, This feels safe. And it got me out of that uncomfortable feeling. Nine months later, I still had that feeling in my gut of what if I worked just as hard as I'm working for this business, but I did it for myself.

And so I think the second time around, it gave me the confidence to say, if you're still feeling like This is you being scared of making a move. It's not that you're not ready. It's not that you're not capable. You're just scared, but you should be scared because it's a scary thing to do. And so I think once I, and I had a great mentor, by the way, a woman that has no reason to help me, but always does.

And she was the one that kind of kicked me in the ass a little bit to say, you need to stop doubting yourself when everyone around you is saying you can, and you're the only person who's saying you can't.

Tracy Young: Yeah, the way I've lived my life is just, especially when there's a hard decision of making a professional change or starting a company.

It's am I going to regret this if I don't do this, am I going to die at my deathbed, like wishing I just tried that. And if there's even any ounce of yeah, that might happen. It's just better to try because in the end, it's actually not that risky. You've got. 18 years of experience behind your belt, this doesn't work out, and I want it to, and it sounds like it is, you can just go find another job that's always there, right?

So in the end, it's never really that risky.

Jen Allen-Knuth: I completely agree with you. And I think sometimes there's an element of ego too, which none of us like to think of ourselves as egotistical creatures, but for sure there was a part of me that's what if I fail and fall on my face publicly? Does that erode all of the 18 years that I've worked so hard to build?

No. And I would, if a friend had asked me that, I would have said, absolutely not, you idiot. I'd rather root for the person that tried and failed than the person who didn't do it at all. But when it comes to ourselves, I think sometimes we like, I'm not speaking for anybody, I'm speaking for myself.

We let that ego drive our decision making. And I do feel like that played into some of my hesitation for sure.

Tracy Young: Yeah and I do think one of the hardest things we have to do as professionals and in life is to not care so much about the criticism of others because it just doesn't matter. It's just a noise.

Jen Allen-Knuth: So hard. So hard. It's still something I'm working on.

Tracy Young: What do you think is the biggest misconception in sales? It sounded like you had some of it, right? And anything like GlenngarryGlenn Ross doesn't help.

Jen Allen-Knuth: That's so funny you mention that. It's one of the things I talk about in keynotes is if you look at any piece of TV, movie entertainment and how sales people are portrayed, it is always some dude in a suit that just knows the exact right thing to say.

And like I said, that was what. It to me out about the profession. And then once I got into it and I looked at the people in the business who are doing well, none of them looked like that. None of them acted like that. And so it was much more about the people who are super intellectually curious. It was actually far more likely the people that I thought did the best were somewhat introverted and weren't the loudest people in the room, but they were the most thoughtful and they were the people that were constantly looking at the customer first and saying, okay, why does, One plus one equals three here.

And why might they do it that way? And they were empathetic. And I think that, in my opinion, is one of the most misunderstood things about sales. It's not about walking into a room, having control over your audience and saying the magic right words. That's like TV stuff. It's actually about all the work we do before we get to the meeting, how thoughtful we are about the customer and how honest we are with them, with ourselves about what the problem size even is.

It's those are things. Before and after I looked at sales vastly different.

Tracy Young: You mentioned cold calls earlier. What do you think about cold calls and cold emails?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yeah. So a lot of my business is about helping people with an outbound sales motion. I have never proclaimed to be an expert cold caller and I never will.

I am someone who believes no channel is dead, but in my opinion, cold email is my preferred channel to start because I think what writing allows us to do is clarify our thinking. And when I have a clarified point of view on what I believe a customer might be up against, That allows me to be way more relevant to them where I loathe cold email is when it's used as a spray and pray channel.

Like I don't, again, I've never sold an SMB, so I'm not going to say it never works. I've always sold an enterprise, but I cannot imagine taking a finite territory and trying to make the job as easy for myself only to pay the consequences of that later. Like to me, cold outreach is a movie trailer of what a first conversation sounds with us would sound like with us.

I believe how we open a conversation is genuinely. What dictates whether we win or lose? Like I'm not in the mindset that to be great at sales, you're a great closer. I think if you're a great opener, closing is a byproduct of that. And so I believe it's this thing that because of technology, we've allowed to treat like an afterthought when in reality it's some of the most important work we.

Do you in sales is how we approach them? At first,

Tracy Young: can you share some tips on structuring strong cold emails to enterprise?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yes. And these are all things I got wrong in the past. So the most important one, if you look at the data that came out of lavender, they've analyzed like billions of cold emails.

Is the length. I think we have to remember, particularly when we're selling into executive suites, these are not people that if they don't recognize the sender are going to sit down and read our novels. Like we have to be concise, punchy, short. It should honestly read more like a text message than it should an eighth grade, essay paper that we're submitting for an a.

And that's part of the problem is we don't unlearn how to write like that and learn how to write for executives. So length is one. Second thing is subject lines. A lot of the classic conventional teaching here has been. Catch attention, which is why we end up with these wild, crazy, unprofessional subject lines that sound exactly like our personal junk folders.

In reality, the subject lines that tend to perform the highest according to the data are ones that are one to two words and they're intentionally pretty boring because if you think about it, executives aren't sitting there often thinking about how do I, what do I subject line title this email to my CFO?

It's it's boring. It's about the subject matter of the email. And so in many ways, the subject line is a big red flashing sign as to whether we belong or don't belong in their inbox. And then the third one, if I could only pick three would be tonality. So the other big mistake I see a lot still is just because we did five minutes of research on an account.

We show up in their inbox and we tell them why their baby is ugly. We have to remember that like you don't have to like the person that you do business with. People buy from people they don't care for quite a bit, but. You have to believe that person has your best interest in mind. If I show up and I say, you see this all the time, and I get this a lot because my website is terrible, but if someone shows up at my inbox and is your website is awful for the following reasons, is that someone I really want to spend time with?

Versus the person that uses unsure, Tonality intentionally, which is like not sure if when you started a business, you ever thought you'd have to spend 16 hours building a website. It's actually pretty tough in the big picture of all the other things you need to do. Like that use of not sure and finding empathy is a much better way to get someone to want to spend time with you versus coming in, even if you're right and doing the wrong tonality and delivery of it.

Tracy Young: Interesting. So is it when you say unsure, you're really talking about being nonjudgmental.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Nonjudgmental. And if we think about it like even if I do 10 hours of research on someone's business, I still don't work there. I don't know. I don't see everything. And so anytime I am talking about their business, that is where I'm applying unsure tonality.

So not sure if as you're moving up market, you're seeing more buyers get involved in your deals and that's slowing down your, cycle time. Am I sure? Probably because that's a logical thing, but maybe they figured out something I don't know. So when the focus of the email is about their business, that's specifically where I'm really intentional about using unsure because it also sparks the human desire to correct.

If I say something and I'm off, a correction would be like, actually it's this and a correction is a reply. And so I want to invite that into the conversation. I don't have to be right. I just have to be specific.

Tracy Young: I see. And do you feel that's how credibility and trust is built?

Jen Allen-Knuth: I think so.

Think about if someone random walked up to me on the street and just said all these things they didn't like about my outfit, I'd be like, okay, maybe you're right, but I don't really feel like I can trust you. If someone came up and said, Hey, I see you're here with your kid. I'm a mom too.

Isn't it so much harder to find time to take care of ourselves when we're taking care of 15 other people around us? I'm going to lean into that person far more than the other person. Again, the other person was still right. Maybe I look like a hot mess. I often do, but I just, I don't feel like I don't feel safe.

I don't feel like I can trust that person. So I think we in sales often confuse being right with being effective where I see a lot of times we can be right and still wrong.

Tracy Young: No we never want people making assumptions about us, especially if they don't know us.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yeah.

Tracy Young: What are the common misconceptions sales teams have about buyer behavior?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Wow. There are so many. Let me pick one. So I think one of the traps I fell into, and one thing I see in a lot of the sellers that I train is this perception that If we can prove we have a better way of solving the problem that customers will buy. And again, you'll notice this, like a lot of my opinions on sales go back to human psychology.

There are so many things we do it, we do not do in our lives, even though we know they're better for us. So as an example, when I got married a year ago. I was convincing myself I was going to go to the gym five days a week. I was setting my alarm at 5 a. m. every morning. I had a compelling event, which was my wedding, and I paid a bunch of money for photographers.

I wanted to get in better shape, but every morning I woke up and I hit snooze. And why did I do that? I guess deep down, I thought I'm in good enough shape. And I think that oftentimes we don't realize that B2B buyers are still humans at their core. They still make all of these like stupid decisions that we do as humans.

And so even if I, as the buyer, raise my hand, I inbound, I say, I want to see, learn more about your product. You show me that your product is a better way. Yeah. It does not mean that I, you win the business because I can decide you're right. You do have a better way, but I'm actually okay with good enough because better means all this potential change, disruption, risk.

What if it goes wrong? And so in many ways, I think we're having the wrong conversation, like winning the argument of we're better only matters if they've decided that the problem with was worth solving and worth solving now. How do you adapt to that? So the big adapt adaptation, is that the right saying it that I've made is slowing down the front of the sales cycle.

So instead of going in and saying, Hey, let me ask a couple surface level questions about your needs. Oh, that's your pain. Great. Let me show you how we can help. And then jumping to demo. I spend far more time now slowing down the customer in many cases to say, before we get on this path, let's make sure you actually have a valid argument for change for yourself and for your business.

Because at the end of this thing. You're probably going to have to go to someone else inside of this business and make a case for change. And we all know how much companies don't want to spend money on net new things. We all know how much companies are averse to risk and change right now. So why don't we solve for that first?

And if we feel like we've got a really good case for change and this is the right time, right thing to do, then we can talk about what the solution would look like. But is that okay with you? And often Where I was fearful is I thought prospects would be like no, I just want to see the product.

But I think oftentimes they just want to rush to product cause they don't actually think the sales person's going to help them with that piece. They view that as that's the hard work I have to go and do. So I'm often met with open arms with that. Not always. Some people just want to see the product fine, show them the product.

But I think in many cases, that's how we choose to drive the conversations that get us into trouble. If we slow down, help the prospects size, the cost of an action to begin with. Then it actually, in my experience, has sped up the remainder of the sales process.

Tracy Young: That is so insightful and I'm so happy you shared that with our listeners.

It's such a direct way of not wasting your time or your prospects time. Is there, do you actually want to go on this journey with me? Do you actually have incentive or reason to make a change? And it gets them to think a little bit deeper than just seeing okay what cool thing are you going to show me or, something I like or not like.

Jen Allen-Knuth: This is why I'm such an advocate of, I think like I was not part of a buying group until I was 17 years into my sales career. And man, when I became part of a buying group, I was like, now I have eyes wide open why sales is so hard. Because in my case, I had gone to a, like a virtual conference and I saw someone talk about a solution to a problem we kept talking about as a business, which was how do we route leads to AEs faster and more accurately.

And so this company like nailed it. And I thought, wow, this is something we keep fighting about in sales and marketing. This is going to be a no brainer. Like six months later, 12 people involved later, we finally made a purchase decision. I thought this would be something they bought in 30 days or less because it wasn't actually a big financial investment.

And so by, by virtue of being a part of that and seeing how like Different parts of the organization will pull away from each other, how they'll resist change, how they'll want to preserve status quo, like totally changed the way that I thought about selling because it taught me you can't just have one person that wants to change.

You have to actually create an environment where lots of different people with opposing views and opposing priorities, they collectively want to change. That's a much harder job.

Tracy Young: What's your advice when there's just so many stakeholders?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yeah, this is another big thing that I always got wrong and changed.

I think Two things. Number one is someone who's interested in our solution does not make a champion. A champion has to be someone who is not only a strong advocate for us, but someone who has the ability, willingness and desire to advocate for this problem back in the buying group. Like I got that wrong a lot.

I would name anyone a champion again. Who liked what we did and I would be very disappointed by their activity in the later half when all of a sudden it was like, Oh, next week I'll bring it up. Next week I'll bring it up. So I learned oftentimes I might have the right solution, wrong person. So we've got to make sure the person who is acting on our behalf internally is in fact motivated to have those conversations.

The research actually shows not to nerd out, but like only 49 percent of people who are willing to buy from us are also willing to advocate. So it's actually a very. It's not the majority. Second thing is, and this is a theme, but we have to slow down. If I show up and I've got one champion who's been on all of my discovery calls, demo calls, and then we bring the solution to the rest of the buying group, the rest of the buying group was not on all those initial calls.

So they have massive missing context and they may disagree. with the decision criteria. They may disagree with the articulation of the problem. And so my first audience with a buying group should not be to show my solution in my opinion. It should be to say, here's how the problem has been articulated to me.

Now, John, you're in this function. I would imagine that this problem actually is pretty important to you. How should the group reconcile these two and get them openly thinking and talking out loud. So we understand the collective thought process of the group, not weighing too much on one individual.

Tracy Young: How do you balance, so many of these sales calls are now on 30 minute zoom calls. So there's just a finite amount of time for you to do discovery and get everyone on the same page and reconcile their specifications for a product. And then also, at some point, maybe give a product demo and handle next steps.

How do you think about balancing all that in just a short, because this might be, this might be your last chance to be able to talk to them in a 30 minute setting remotely.

Jen Allen-Knuth: I absolutely love this question because this was a huge mental block for me as I was always trying to think like, how do I cram everything into 30 minutes?

And I think it was the wrong goal. My goal in 30 minutes is actually to leave that person wanting more conversation at the end. Like I intentionally want to be like, shoot, it's minute 28. I know we need to wrap up now, but here's what I'm thinking we cover next time. Oftentimes I think the pressure to do a lot is driven by ourselves.

It's I got a pipeline number. I've got a goal. I've got to close this thing as fast as possible. So I'm the one rushing it. When I found myself doing that, I almost always lost those deals. Because it was me trying to force them to move quickly. When I said, let me slow down. No one likes to be rushed when they're buying, particularly if they're buying something expensive.

And let me make sure I'm having the right conversations. Honestly, the buyer was more often than not receptive to it. I'm not going to say it's a silver bullet. Nothing is in sales. There were certainly buyers who'd be like, just show me the product. Those people almost always never bought two. So yeah.

Okay. Here's the product. Do you like it or do you not but I think in general we have way more control and we have way more time than we often perceive that we do if we do the right order of activities. No one wants a two hour long demo, but I do find people enjoy talking about the problem state quite a bit.

Tracy Young: So it sounds like your suggestion is. Not only slow down, get to the substance of the problems that you're going to solve for them and just making sure everyone's on the same page here so you can actually have a great value proposition to offer on how you're going to solve this for them or meet their expectations.

And then also lead them at the end of the meeting let's talk about these things at the next meeting, the next time, just assuming you're going to get a next meeting. Clearly you want to talk more. So let's talk about these topics at our next meeting together.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yes. I, again, I'm a big analogy person, so forgive me, but if, if you were looking for advice on, I don't know, something in your personal life, like redesigning your living room, let's just use something we've all probably done.

Do I want the person? Who sat down with me and understood like who's in the living room. When do we go to the living room? Do I have a family? Do I have extended family? Or do I want the person that's just oh, I've got the perfect living room for you. How do you know? Do you even know who I am?

Do you know who we are as a family unit? And so I think again, a lot of this is just driven by our own desire to move quickly. I've never regretted slowing down. I can say that. I wish I started slowing down sooner, but I've never regretted slowing down since I have.

Tracy Young: We talked about you learning from your dad and just the power of fast decision making and then now hearing about slowing down.

How do you help companies recognize that the cost of inaction can outweigh the risks of change, especially in the long run?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Oh, such a powerful question. I think we're all naturally fearful of change. I think we all naturally think we're solving the problem to the best of our ability. Cost of inaction, the reason it's probably my favorite thing I ever learned and the thing I'm most excited to teach other people is because you have the opportunity to make an idea your customers.

So what I mean specifically is if I come to you and I say, This is what it's costing you to solve the problem the way you've always done it. Naturally, we're going to get defensive, and I'm going to try to pick it apart. If I say instead, here's a way to size the cost of an action. You just need to plug in your numbers here, and here.

And let me know if you come, what you come up with, and if it warrants, if it's a big enough cost of an action to warrant action against it. And what happens is when they hit the enter button on the formula, it is their idea. And so when you have a great idea, what do we all do? We cannot wait to go and share it.

So then it's let me tell my boss, let me tell this other person, look what I figured out. And so I think in many ways, that's the power of cost of inaction is you make it their idea. You are the person that helped facilitate it. But I'll give you a very quick example of when I did this. There was a big like fortune two 50 company I was working with who came in bound and said, look, we've got like 25, 000 to spend on some sales training.

What can you do? First of all, our company didn't have a 25, 000 offer. So the answer would have been like nothing. And so when instead, what I did is I said, listen, like there's tons of stuff we could probably do with you, but let me start here. Like when I look at your business, it seems to me like no decision might be an outcome because of these things I see about what you sell.

Validate, correct me where I'm wrong. So first get problem correction. Yes, we are seeing that. Okay. Have you ever sized how many opportunities you're losing to no decision? No, because it's not a closed loss reason. Okay. Here's a way to get a ballpark guesstimate. Go in your CRM, filter all of your forecasted opportunities and filter by.

opportunities that have not had a conversation with your sales rep in the last 30 days. Can we agree that's probably a sign that someone is not actively moving forward in the deal? Yes. Okay. Then add up the forecasted value of the pipeline for those opportunities and come back to me next week and let me know what the number is.

This person came back to me the following Wednesday and said, Jen, we added up our opportunities. It was 90 million in opportunities that have not had a conversation with a sales rep in the last. 30 days. Does that mean they're going to spend 90 million with me? Of course not. But we went from, I have 25, 000 to now I've got a 90 million problem that we hadn't looked at this way.

How can we solve for 10 percent of that problem? Cause that would be a meaningful dent. And so that's where I think the power is like you can totally change your circumstances. If you can hold up a mirror to that prospects business and show them, give them a way to calculate it.

Tracy Young: And by the way, this is so funny you mentioned that because this is what TigerEye does really well, you can ask questions like that, like, how many opportunities have our reps not engaged with in the last 90 days and then get an instant response from your CRM data?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Which is great, because it took this person a week and several weeks. Yeah, I know you did. Your way sounds much better to me.

Tracy Young: You've obviously seen just Great leaders come and go and just different flavors of leaders and different cultures, even at the same company. What is strong like sales culture look like and what is weaker sales culture look like?

Jen Allen-Knuth: So I'll give you an answer for strong and answer for weak. Strong sales culture to me and strong sales leadership to me is a leader who's willing to give you tough love. This is probably the thing that I appreciate the most about the leaders I worked for is there's a story I tell all the time where I was like, I was in enterprise.

It's not like a segment where you get a ton of leads. And so I was going to my sales leader and complaining about the fact that, I hadn't gotten any leads for the last three months and this is unfair. And why isn't marketing doing more? And I was doing what we tend to do, which is finger pointing and complaining.

And he stopped me and he said, Jen, you're not wrong. You should be getting more leads, but the reality is you're as you aren't. And you probably won't be able to fix this problem with marketing, at least for another six months, optimistically speaking. So you have a choice to make, which is, do you want to spend our one on ones complaining about someone else not doing the right work?

Or do you want to spend our one on ones figuring out what is within your control? And in the moment, I was like, that is not the answer I wanted. I wanted you to say you were going to go yell at marketing, but you're right. And I just appreciate that he, this is my manager, Kevin Hart. He had the courage and the confidence to have that conversation with me because it would have been far more easier for him to be my buddy and be like, yeah, let's rally up against marketing.

So that, in my opinion is a number one sign of a great sales culture as a leader who's willing to give their reps tough love. The number one sign of a weak sales culture, in my opinion, and I know a lot of people won't like this answer is sales is a numbers game mindset. I, again, I won't speak for SMB, never sold in it.

Maybe that's different probably is, but if you are selling to mid market and enterprise clients, I don't ever want to hear that sales is a numbers game. It's totally diminishing how important the sales experience and sales conversation is.

Tracy Young: Thanks for sharing that. What's your long term goals at DemandGen?

Jen Allen-Knuth: This is probably not one that I don't, maybe many people say this, it's to have a really good work life balance. I spending 18 years with as a frontline seller, not a sales leader, as someone who was carrying a number every single year meant like 20 years of my life was basically revolving around my work.

And so what's really important to me now is I leave a lasting impact. That I help keep people in a profession that deserve to be there that think they don't. And that I help people avoid a lot of the mistakes that took me a long time to learn. If I can leave demand gen, leaving that mark, I feel really good about the work I do while being a great mom, while caring about the passions I care about, like dog rescue.

If I can do those things, I'd look back on this as a success.

Tracy Young: Oh, that is so sweet. And for the listeners who can't see the video version of this, Jenna has this really cute, lathing doll of Belia sleeping behind her. That'll roll over occasionally. He's

Jen Allen-Knuth: always like doing the stupidest poses while I'm on these things.

Tracy Young: Very cool. You you foster Dogs. Thank you. Let's see a couple more questions and I can talk to you for a much longer time. Of course, you're awesome with this based on your experience. What advice would you give? Young sales professionals starting out.

Jen Allen-Knuth: I would say study your buyer way more than you spend time studying your own product.

Not saying your product isn't important, but the context of understanding what does your target prospect, like what do they do outside of the problem that you solve? What are the things that make them sweat? What are the things that get them fired? What are the things that like frustrate the hell out of them?

If you learn that stuff first and then learn your product, you've got what a lot of sellers don't have, which is context. So you can come in and you can problem storytell far more effectively than sellers who are just learning product first and are product storytelling. So that's my number one advice.

My second piece of advice is I'm not big on the term personal branding, but I do believe if you are great at sales. You become great at sales. There's no reason you couldn't be successful as a business owner if you wanted to be one because being a great salesperson is running your own business.

And so if that is at any way, shape or form an aspiration for you, think about what am I putting out into the universe that tells people what I stand for, what I believe and how am I showing up in the places that my customers go to learn? I can honestly say I could have never started my own business.

Had I not invested in using LinkedIn as a channel, and I'm not by any means an expert on it, but that is what gave me the platform to be able to do this. So if that is in any way, shape or form, part of your aspirations in the future, start that work now because it only helps you be better at your own job and it helps you build the skill of writing too, which I think is also just an underappreciated job to be done of sellers right now.

Tracy Young: Really good advice. Understanding the. Desires and fears of your buyer and then you can tailor every conversation To making sure they're going to achieve their desires and mitigate their fears where every conversation is incredibly valuable. So what's your tips for engaging in social media?

Jen Allen-Knuth: Don't try to be the smartest person in the room. That's a mistake I made. I was so fearful of people being like, you're wrong, or this is a stupid point, but I was just really safe a lot. Like I'd be like, here's a research study. And granted, I love bioresearch is still, I just posted about bioresearch today.

I was doing it because I was scared to have an opinion because I thought someone would just embarrass me. I think that is part of the beauty of social media is unlike a sales call where there's a lot to lose. If you're wrong, if you're wrong on social media and you frame it in a way where you're not, you don't believe you're right or you're the expert, you actually get in market feedback, which then allows you to correct or, fix your pitch.

So there will be times where I will ask questions in posts. I'll just if you're nervous about posting something, Ask a question like, Hey, what is the smartest way you've seen one of your sellers book a meeting this year? People love to share. People love to talk about their wins. And then you gain all of this insight, all of these ideas, and then you can share that back with your community.

So I think sometimes we One, are fearful of looking stupid and two, we just don't think we have anything to say. I don't believe that ever. We always have something to say, but if you're fearful of it, think about how can you drive two way engagement and then be a kind of a megaphone for what you learn for other reps.

Tracy Young: Tell us about one person who's helped you become the leader in person you are today.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Oh, and who's helped you on the journey. Let's see. Let's see outside of the people that I've mentioned today. I think one person who funny enough, came into my life in 21 when I was hosting the challenger sale podcast, she was a guest I'd never met.

She was someone, a friend of mine spoke very highly of her name is Amy Volos. She came on the show and just blew me away with her force of presence, her confidence, her ability to be joyful and still be brilliant. And I think in many ways she's been just a huge role model to me. Just like how she shows up, her ability to be authentic, her ability to shoot everything straight.

This woman does not have a fake bone in her body. And so I think she's like my little hero now as a salesperson.

Tracy Young: Amazing. Last question for you, what advice would you give? I don't know, Jen, 20 years ago, yourself,

Jen Allen-Knuth: stop trying to be what you think is a good salesperson and start recognizing that who you are is your differentiator.

And I know that sounds corny and I know it sounds cheesy, but like I felt a ton of insecurity being like, I'm not like the top salesperson at my company. I'm not someone who never takes no for an answer. I'll take no for an answer all the time. And so I felt like I was trying to copy or mirror that when it just wasn't who I was.

When I really started getting good at sales, it was. When I just realized like who I am is my differentiator That is what makes me unique and that's something no one else can claim And so find a way to make it your superpower for me. Like i'm not i'm pretty casual I think i'm witty. I was scared to show up that way because I deemed that it would be unprofessional but once I started doing I realized I was getting much more like I was getting so much further beyond surface level relationships with my prospects, and in many cases they were very similar, and so they appreciated that.

I was the one holding back from that, so lean into who you are, it's actually, it totally is a superpower.

Tracy Young: Yeah, because even in business, you want to do business with real people even with your vendors. You just want to interact. The human connection is so important we're tribal people, we evolve that way.

Jen Allen-Knuth: Yes, I love that point.

Tracy Young: Wonderful advice that I hope everyone. Takes away with we need more of that in business

Jen Allen-Knuth: agreed.

Tracy Young: That's what I'm drawn to for sure Jen Thank you so much for joining us today is so many nuggets and we takeaways. I'm excited to relisten to this podcast myself Thank

Jen Allen-Knuth: you so much.

I loved our conversation. Thank you again for having me on. This is a joy

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