(0:05 – 0:55)

Welcome to Inside the Funnel by durhamlane. This is where we sit down with sales and marketing leaders and unpack what’s driving pipeline, what’s working, what’s not, and what they’ve learned along the way, one guest at a time. I’m your host, Richard Lane.

I’ve always believed that when you ask great questions, you have the best conversations, and that’s exactly what this podcast is about. So let’s get inside the funnel. I’m delighted to be joined on today’s episode by not just one, but two guests.

We’ve got Tom Stearns and Peter Cleary, authors of Graphic Sales, How to Build a Prospecting Playbook. I’ve got it here in front of me. I was in the US just a week ago, and Tom kindly sent me it, and it actually got to my hotel before I left the hotel.

So that was a win in itself. So Tom, Peter, thank you for the copy, and thanks very much for being guests on my podcast today. Much appreciated.

(0:56 – 1:28)

Great to be here. Thanks for having us. So let’s just get us started.

Maybe Tom will start with you. Just maybe perhaps if you guys could just do a quick intro of yourselves for our listeners, and then we’ll get into the content of the book. Sure.

Yeah, I’m Tom Stearns. I’ve been running my own consulting, go-to-market consulting business for about 12 years now. Before that, I was sales on the inside and marketing before that, and I usually help companies with struggling outbound teams, go-to-market teams, and try and fix it up and help them scale.

(1:29 – 2:01)

Right. Good. And Peter? I’m currently working at a company called Akamai, but previous to that, I worked for a company for over 20 years in sales. I did from a salesperson to sales engineering, sales leadership, director of sales engineering for the Northeast. So a lot of experience in sales. And so Tom and I, we’ve known each other for a very long time. We share a lot of stories. And as you kind of go through the sales for 20 years, you meet a lot of characters. We decided to write some of those stories down because quite frankly, we laughed a lot when we told the stories about some of the things we did and some of the people we met along the way.

(2:02 – 2:57)

Awesome. Well, we’ll try and uncover some of those, Peter, as we go through on this episode. But as I said, I’ve got a copy of your new book, Graphic Sales, How to Build a Prospecting Playbook for Sales Leaders in front of me.

So firstly, congratulations. I hear it’s riding high on the Amazon charts, Tom, according to LinkedIn. So that’s fabulous news.

Congratulations. Let’s just start with the, well, perhaps you could just share with listeners the background to the book and I guess sort of how it came about and what you’re trying to achieve from the blend of cartoon and words. Peter, you want to give the backstory of how we almost got here? Yeah.

So Tom and I, actually, we’ve known each other since college. And every year when we get together with our college friends and we were driving one year, I started to realise the realisation that we had a lot in common. Well, I was a history major, he was an art major, he was doing marketing, and then I was in sales and then engineering.

(2:57 – 4:53)

But the sales stories were very much the same. And we started telling stories and realising oh, well, we have a lot in common and we’ve had a lot of sales stories in common. Then flash forward, Tom has his consulting company and I’m like, well, all consultants write books, you’re going to write a book. And he’s like, well, they’re all the same. He’s like, it’s just common sense. It’s all the same. And I was like, well, we both love comics. We love the graphic stories. Sales is like a graphic novel. It’s humorous and scary and horrifying and colourful. And the characters are evil or very good.

So this fits into a graphic sales. Depending on whether it’s the end of the quarter or the beginning. Yes. And then usually it’s the sales manager who’s the evil guy at the last day of the month.

Where are you? Call your customer. So we started working on it and the idea morphed a lot. But we spent probably a year, year and a half of ideas about what we would do for stories. We started writing the stories and I think it really came together when Tom found Eli Stone, who’s an unbelievable artist and makes this whole thing really come to life of what we’re doing. So it helped us understand how to write the stories and how to come up with this. And then I think we decided to merge that with what Tom’s doing. So I’ll turn it over to Tom to your thought process of merging the two together.

Yeah. So after, I think we published about a story a month, Richard, for going on maybe two years, I think. And we had this stack of stories. And at the same time, I’m working with my clients a lot and a lot of outbound work, these particular clients. And one of them said to me, Hey, I want a playbook. Like I want it all written down. And another client at the same time kind of said the same thing. And I’ve done playbooks have come in and out. And so I did that. I wrote them. I wrote playbooks and what I, again, so I kind of was coming back to what was old is new again, like really writing it down.

(4:53 – 6:19)

And the thought process of going through all the categories of information that a team needed really reminded me of that. What we need to do is set a great foundation. So after doing that, I turned to Peter, I said, Hey, you know what? I think like a good chunk of these stories match lessons. And for each chapter of a book around how to build a playbook. What if we wrote a playbook about how to write a playbook, but we did it with our comics and a lot of the things that I have built or am building. And so we could, those two converged. And that’s what you’re holding today is sort of this blend of story, comic lesson in behind them, humour. And then so each chapter starts with a comic and then it gets into the, the real meat of how to do this particular thing that your team needs to succeed.

And each chapter covers another piece of that. One of the things I think that drives home the, so you’ve got the learning and you’ve got the comedic, but the, you know, the cartoons, but the cartoons are great because it’s, it’s always the opposite. It’s like, the cartoons are always like, this is a lesson we learned, but of what not to do. So it gives you a good example, right. Going into the chapter of like, this is what it looks like when you don’t follow this method. So I think that’s what we kind of enjoyed about it. Like, yeah, we’ve got true life examples of when you don’t do what we’re going to tell you to do.

(6:19 – 7:20)

Yeah, absolutely. I think for me personally, sort of reading through, I think the comics just break it up in a way that doesn’t normally happen. I think you get a little bit of playbook fatigue when you’re reading a book on how to create a playbook and another chapter, and it always ends a chapter with things I need to think about, you know, and then you go into the next one and, you know, and then you put it down and find something else to do.

But yeah, I think the, the visual nature of it really helps the different parts of the brain sort of focus maybe. But that’s interesting what you said, Tom. So you were doing the sort of graphic sales and then I guess the playbook pieces, is that in your business, what you’re being, you find customers struggle with the most, or is that just one of the areas that you seem to spend a lot of time on? It’s one of the areas I, and it’s, so the playbook is representative of the thinking, really.

Right. You know, I, I, in my consultancy, I, I have a blend, like I’m usually a fixer, like let’s figure out what’s the problem is. But a lot of times it’s, you know, the outbound engine.

(7:20 – 8:38)

And I think what the playbook represents is that you have to think through as a leadership team, the whole ecosystem, right? What’s your ideal customer profile? What’s our value? What’s our messaging? Like you need to think through all those foundational components and you need to document them. And you also need to give great detail, right? It needs to get down to the nitty gritty. So, and that’s what I do with a lot of my clients, like figure all that out, put it in one place because they, when I leave, they want to know that they’ve got a foundation, though it, though it lives and grows, but then the nuts and bolts, right? How are we going to onboard people? Like, what do we say? What do we write? What are examples? So that was my attempt to sort of mirror my consultancy.

Like, I think we’ve got a few book ideas in us and always have, but we chunked out a piece of it to mirror this practical thing that, that just presented itself that I find every team is missing or these things, all these components live in 30 different locations and notion and slack and it’s the thinking’s everywhere. So, and that’s, so it’s sort of what I bring to my clients, but also, you know, the, what they need to do themselves. And a lot of people just don’t do, and that’s ultimately the going to turn itself into a playbook.

(8:38 – 9:11)

Yeah. And I think, so at durhamlane, we have our methodology selling a high level. It’s very attuned to the journey you take your readers on, question-based, consultative in nature. And I always think, you know, we turned 15 recently as a company and I think, how is this still working? Well, partly that’s because it’s so simple, you know, and I guess often the best things are. So I really like the way that you’ve weaved it together. And some of that, some of the headlines are great because sometimes you need to zig when everyone else is also sequencing.

(9:14 – 11:26)

Because I think that’s the trouble. I mean, it would be good as we sort of, as we meander around this conversation, you know, one thing that comes to mind for me is there’s just not enough thinking goes into selling, you know, let’s sequence the hell out of something we haven’t really thought about. Well, the great thing, so I’ve morphed away from sales the past bunch of years, but what’s the thing sales teaches you? And I’ve always said, but the thing about sales, it’s the hardest, easiest job you can do because it’s, well, what sales teachers like, it’s all about the outcome.

Like, right. It’s like, sales is very easy. Did you hit your number? Did you not hit your number? What’s there? There’s data to prove it, but there’s a lot of noise that can distract you and not focused on. And I think the playbook and way Tom thinks about it and teaches it, we talk about a lot is you’ve got to, if you work really hard at that foundational point, it becomes easy, but you’ve got to focus and concentrate on that. What are the outcomes you want here? And there’s almost all the chapters are based off of that outcome thinking is like your ICP, what you might want to sell a lot more to everybody, but what can you do? What is the expected outcome? And how are you setting that foundation up there in all of the joking and all the things we do, the foundation is extremely solid.

And like, it is that thinking and what people like, what is the outcome you need to get? You want to get to, and how do you get to that outcome and what do you need to do? And where’s the data that proves it behind it, rather than just wishing you can sell more by selling low down downstream. But do you have the capability to do that? Do you have the foundation set up to do that? And I think that’s why we started with this book is the foundational thinking that you need to have.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that comes across and now I’m seeing the whole series, I’m seeing the series come through. So very, very good. In terms of the creative process then, Tom, how did, and I must admit, I probably quite an easy mistake, but I forgot to credit Eli as one of the coauthors, although you brought him in. So I was thinking in words rather than pictures, but how did you, how did the creative process take shape then? How did you blend the two together? And was it a lot of fun or was it really hard work? Or was it somewhere in the middle? I think it was, well, it was a lot of hard work, but it was a blast.

(11:26 – 15:14)

Was hard for Tom, really simple for me. I’m pretty good at executing things and Peter’s a pretty good, is super clever and pretty witty. But yeah, I wrote an article recently, how I call myself, I tell my kids I’m a turtle, right? I’m just going to keep at something. And that’s like, we didn’t write the book overnight. Like we spent a couple of years just telling stories.

We spent six months to a year writing them down and writing scripts and seeing if we had anything there. Then we found Eli and Eli, we figured out how to work together, right? Like you could, Peter said that when we were first writing stories, like they were too verbose, right? And through iteration and sort of Eli been doing this for ever, you know, he, we learned how to write for Eli and what to hand over to him. So the stories got better.

And then when it came to the book, that was a tonne of work, frankly, in the sense of like, great, exciting work. But it was, you know, writing the chapters, giving him the Peter to layer on, like, you know, we fought about ICP definition, even the title for it. Cause Peter’s old school and he calls it target account profile, you know, and everybody in SAS today calls it ICP. So we would debate and we would wrestle on like attributes and things, and then write and then a draft.

And then we found this guy, Corey, Corey Kirby, who’s like the, like another member of our team, who is basically a guy that helps people publish books like experts, you know, out of Washington. And he was, he was instrumental cause he, we got on the phone with him. We had originally written the book in two parts. He’s like, I couldn’t get through part one. I almost quit, quit on you guys. Right. He’s like, then I got to part two and it was magic. He’s like, so here’s what you need to do. So it was another rewrite and then back and forth.

And I’m like, Peter had some jokes here. So yeah, it was, it was all a blast, but yeah, it was a year of grinding out the actual book too. The other thing I’ll add to that is, and I think cause, because this is not just how we work together, but what makes good teams work well together is I think some people would say that there’s zero ego, but I believe that I have so much ego. It doesn’t matter if you tell me from wrong or right. It’s the same mentality. It’s all good.

So yeah. So I think Tom and I work really well together because we don’t take it personally. Right. So any, any thing that we come back and say, I don’t like that. It wasn’t a, you know, like Tom, I don’t like you. It is, Hey, can we do this better? And let’s think about it. So Tom would give me feedback. I’d give him feedback and it’d be like, okay, what can I do differently? I understand. Why would you say that? Okay. Let me understand that.

And then we went and we brought in Eli. We really started understanding I’m like, Oh, so we don’t have to write everything out because he can draw so well. We could capture a lot of the idea in that painting, right? The painting is a 10,000 words. So and then Corey helped us kind of control our thought process. Like what, what is the audience going to like, and how do we control our thought process? So I think the foundationally it is we’re egoless, right? Like, okay, what’s going to make this the best thing we can do?

And I think that actually also, I think the success we’ve had in our, in our professional life is using a team to get to where you want to, and don’t worry about where the credit lines are. If you did well, it’s like, what, what’s the outcome here where we want to produce and how we produce the best we can. Yeah.

(15:14 – 16:18)

Awesome. So, so maybe then Tom thinking about it, Peter was your sort of experience, critical friend in the process. So you probably came to the show with your methods and your ways of working and how you do what you do. Peter comes with experience and goes, well, I would call that target account, not ICP, or, you know, well, we do this, or we do this, or what about this? And so you get that blend of, you get the blend of intellectual with the real doing as well.

And I think that came, that came through to me as I, you know, I read a lot of these types of books, and you often don’t get necessarily the, that execution layer, quite the way I’ve felt it through the book. And then you’ve obviously got the pictures as well, which is, as I said before, gives you the sort of shifts your brain around a little bit, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. Yeah.

I think we had a great, and we went outside too. I mean, like, so the LinkedIn chapter, Lori Richardson, I, we asked to proofread the whole book. She’s a, she’s a long time friend, a legend in sales. And she did, she gave us thorough feedback, but she looked at the LinkedIn chapter I had originally. I, I do a lot of that. I kind of on that. And, and she was like, is this how you guys really think about LinkedIn? And I’m like, I don’t know if it is. So we, we entirely rewrote the LinkedIn chapter after kind of, so just a good observation from a close friend that said, this isn’t how you behave. Like she just kind of, you know, I miss the forest for the trees. I think Peter missed it too. She brought us so trusted friends. Hey, drive the bus over me right away.

(16:19 – 17:35)

The ego suddenly shot up there. Missed what? Hey, missed the wood for the trees. Yeah.

So what, what are you hoping readers to take away then? Maybe I’ll ask you both because you’re both individuals, you have slightly different answers, but Tom, what are you, what are you hoping people take from, from the book? And you’ve said it’s for sales leaders, but I, I guess it’s for anyone that wants to improve their sales, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, we wrote it for sales leaders. Of course, I think if you’re a sales person, you can get a lot out of it too, of course, but we, you know, I work with sales leaders. I want sales leaders to take this seriously because without this thinking, without doing this, then the sales reps aren’t gonna perform. Right. So and that’s who I work with a lot. So my perspective is like, Hey, we need to build this so your team can thrive. And I’ve read a lot of sales books, right? And I don’t know how many I’ve actually finished. What I wanted this to give was how to build the foundation, exactly what you need to do. And then the nuts and bolts of how to do it down to the nitty gritty with real examples from real clients, because I think that’s important.

(17:35 – 19:40)

I bring, I think a lot of strategy, but I’m willing to get my hands dirty. And I’m not that scalable because of that, right? I listened to cold calls. I sit in on Discovery. I rewrite scripts. I rewrite sequences. And I’m like, I think that the, all that knowledge is important. So I tried to hand that thinking and give it like the credibility. Like, yeah, these are all real examples from real clients.

And then I think the, what I wanted the story to do was to keep it moving and the layout to like, Corey brought the layout. Cause we said, this has to move. I don’t want like that experience that you had to get to the end of the chapter. I’ve got an assignment. I don’t want to do it. How do we keep it moving and entertain people at the same time? Like no sales book has done before.

Yeah. And Peter, anything to add to that from your side? I think Tom missed it. We want to make a lot of money. I think one of the, I think Tom and I both inherently like to coach people. So what do you get in the sales? And we’ve all seen it. You see the bad leadership of just, Hey, where, how many doors did you knock today? How many phone calls did you make today? How many emails did you send today? Because I’ve got the stat sheet that tells me you’ve got to make 200 to get to this. Like, well, there’s a hell of a lot. Like you’re starting in the middle and you don’t have any foundation for this.

And how do you build this? So, you know, I have kids, Tom has kids and their reaction to what they think sales is to what sales like they think of, they use car sales, but that mentality, like it’s not, it’s a science. It is, you know, helping people. It is, there’s a lot of very, there’s a lot of benefits to that from, from, you know, if you’re the right person, like I, you know, I’m not the type of person who can just sell anything, but I’m like, I can find out, I’d ask you questions, find out what your business need is, and it fits you into what what’s needed to solve that problem. I love actually coaching people to get to that point. Like, how can you help people? Cause that to me is most rewarding. So I think that’s what resonates for Tom and I in this book is like, how do we coach people en masse and show them like what we enjoy to do?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you’re right. I always talk about the happy trip up club. You know, I, no one ever said, Richard, we think you’d make a great sales professional.

(19:40 – 22:01)

I actually, I, I snuck into a career service back in the day and someone said, Richard, we think you’d be great for market research, which is sort of the same thing in lots of ways, but they just sales, you know, and big, big thing for me is sales. Certainly in the UK, I think it’s better in the US but certainly in the UK, it’s still not considered a graduate profession and universities get credits for graduates getting into graduate professions. And so, you know, that’s part of my mission has always been to try and bring more professionalism to the sales profession and make people proud to be in sales.

And, you know, I think your book can, can definitely help people on that way. And I would always say to listeners that aren’t necessarily sales leaders, I’ll be saying to you, if you want to be, and if you want to get better, you should read what sales leaders are reading. So go out, get the book and read it, understand it, and then put it into your daily practise.

One thing, Tom, I did love at the end was because I do believe we have this challenge as probably any business does, but how do you keep your playbook updated? Right? So, you know, it’s not a book that sits on a shelf. It needs to be a living and breathing document and, uh, be good to get your thoughts on how you work with teams on that. Because for me, that’s one of the big challenges is getting people to invest enough of themselves in something that it becomes something they want to keep as a living and breathing document.

Yeah. So I’m a realist about these two, right? So when I work with teams, we build in phases, right? So we’re building the playbook during a consulting engagement. And so what I advise, you know, leaders that are doing this is like, like, get, get the foundation done, right? Get like 60, 70% of all of these chapters, if you will, all of these categories, you know, get something together and then, and document it, have it in one place.

But then your goal is to work with the team to iterate, right? To get real examples, then put them into your own playbook and update it and make it a living, breathing document. Um, where it tends to stick, Richard, is when teams are scaling and we’re bringing on new reps every quarter, every month that tends to help the document stay alive, because each class wants to hear real examples from real reps doing these things that you’ve you’re training them on.

(22:01 – 26:39)

So it incentivise or like I still do it. So I will continually update a playbook that I built for a team, the training, taking real calls, real examples, new sequences. So a lot of it depends on like how much time a manager has to coach and train and also on board because they’ll, they’ll be forced by new reps to, Hey, I’d like to hear a real example, not the example from six months ago. No one opens their call like that anymore. It needs to be leadership driven, of course, right? Leaders need to be like, I need to maintain and grow and iterate this.

I think the, uh, the playbook, you build a foundation, like a process. So the playbook is a process in like any process, new technologies come across to basically, once you look at the process, say, Oh, instead of doing it this way, I can have, you know, now I can have AI do something, but it’s still the process under the underlying process, what you’re trying to do is accurate and solid. And that shouldn’t change much.

It is a lot of those things like, what do I insert efficiencies? Can I use a tool to create this as an efficiencies? Do I, as Tom says, why just what I’m saying, because I, I found it has more success here. So it’s an iterative approach of how you address those processes, but the process, and that’s what the foundation, the playbook is, is a foundation that you can refer to and say, how do I then improve this? It’s the GE black belt mentality. Like, okay, how do I go into here and improve this process? And it could be a tool. It could be a way you address it. It could be the market you’re going after you find success in place else, but how, what you’re doing, it should be pretty, you know, bedrock. And that’s what the, that’s

Yeah. And it’s the piece that’s missing from so many organisations, isn’t it? And I think technology has been a challenge for us in this respect as an industry, because people go out and buy the technology without having the process or without seeing to your point, Peter, how it can make the process more efficient or more effective. They go out and buy the technology and then reverse engineer everything to fit, which means that you end up sending out loads of crap rather than just a bit of crap. You automate the rubbish as it were.

And so yeah, absolutely essential key takeaway from today’s conversation is you’ve got to nail who you’re going after, why are you going off them? How are you going to do it? What works before you then scale it? Your playbook is the driver for your AI, if that’s what you’re using too. So I’ve got some clients that are, you know, they use a tool and the reps can warm up with AI before they make a call, but the AI hasn’t been programmed properly. So they’re having an unrealistic cold call. So it’s like, well, why isn’t it programmed? Well, we never actually wrote down how we want it to be, right?

That’s sort of the purpose of going through the playbook process, which is the thinking, the documenting, and then iterating. And so, you know, what I do, what I’ve done is I’ve taken my own book, programmed my own AI, and I use it. So when we’re writing messaging, the AI I’ve programmed from my own book methodologies is going to challenge me and say, hey, you need a persona and you need messaging for that persona. You haven’t actually defined the persona yet. I’ve taught it to like dope slap me and be like, you need to do this first. So I have to go back to the client.

If you’re using AI, it’s not that you need a printed playbook to sit on someone’s desk. It’s you need to go through these categories of information, document them. And then if you’re using AI, train it with that, and then you can iterate. So a living, breathing document might not, it’s not paper anymore. It’s the thinking.

I was just talking to my team, you know, talk about AI, talk about the process and the tools. I was talking to my team and they’re relatively younger. And somebody said like, you know, AI is something new and different that we have to think about. And I’m like, I go, everything we’re talking about AI, I remember years ago, I was talking about the CRM and when Salesforce came out and I’m like, you, people just rolled it out, but how I remember what rolled out in my company and where everybody’s using it and leadership wants to use Salesforce.com.

And my VP was still telling us to work off of a spreadsheet. So what we put in Salesforce was what leadership wanted to see, but we were using spreadsheet about what we were actually going to sell. I’m like, well, this isn’t working because how it was supposed to be used, wasn’t defined because a lot of the rules were in place about, okay, how are we supposed to use this intelligently? AI is still stuck in the same thing. It’s a lot more intelligent. There’s a lot of power behind it, but still you have to define how is everybody going to use this? So what’s the outcome we want to get from this?

And quite frankly, all of these situations, don’t be afraid of the truth. Like sometimes the outcome, you know, you’re going to learn is this isn’t working. I’m like, great. You kind of didn’t figure out where it isn’t working, but that’s, you gotta just be as truthful and honest, but set that, set that the boundaries up like Tom did for the AI, because that’s the only way it can work properly.

(26:39 – 29:18)

Yeah. And that’s a, that’s a great point to maybe sort of conclude on there is keep testing everything and don’t be afraid of things not working. And I think sometimes we get afraid of things not working and we carry on anyway. Whereas I always think that if you understand what’s not working a day sooner, then you’ve got one more day to put it right and to, to be more effective.

Very good. Well, look guys, it’s been great talking through the book with you, maybe just to finish off, it’d be great to hear of your hopes and ambitions for the book. So Peter wants to make a tonne of money. Tom, should we be waiting on the next series? Is there going to be a series of books or what are you thinking? Where, where are your heads at with this? Are you still, still in the glow of release? Yeah, we’re, we’re in the, we’re in the focus of relief right now.

And my wife and CFO is focused on like, when are we going to make some money from this, Tom? So she’s much like Peter. But, but yeah, I, I, I want to help people, but I also would like it to like increase leads and credibility for myself so I can continue to get clients in my business. And yeah, I hope we keep writing stories and maybe future books, but we’ll see.

One of the, one of the things that Tom and I have talked about before is we kind of grow this foundation, I think because it’s unique and it’s catching to expand it to, you know, sales kickoffs and just different presentation. Like there’s a lot more because I think, you know, we’ve talked about this early on, but the stories help you learn the lesson, right? So if we can drive those stories, you know, I think it’s better than trying to be in class and trying to teach us like, like, this is the result. Here’s the funny stories, but there’s lessons behind it.

It’s like, you know, we’re living with a new Aesop’s fables is what we are. Okay. Very well. And there we end on a lofty ambition.

Very good. Well, Peter, Tom, really appreciate you joining me today. Thank you so much for sharing the background and how the book came out. And congratulations again on, on Graphic Sales. Thank you Richard. Appreciate it.

And thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Inside the Funnel. If you found our conversation useful or even thought provoking, please give us a follow and share with someone in your world who you think will enjoy it too. And if you’re curious about how we approach modern SDR programmes and pipeline generation and use Tom and Peter’s book to build new playbooks, then you’ll find more at durhamlane.com. Until next time, keep asking great questions and we’ll see you soon. Thank you.