Four Lessons I Learned from Rainmaker 2016

I was blessed with the chance to attend the Rainmaker 2016 conference in Atlanta Georgia a couple of days ago. It was a great learning experience about sales and insight on the future of the B2B industry. I sat in on four sessions and took notes on each of the four presenters: Jacco van der Kooij, John Barrows, Ralph Barsi and the man the myth the legend himself Gary Vaynerchuk. Each one of these presenters brought an unique perspective to the B2B space that I will be sharing with you all in this article.

Here are the four lessons that I learned from the four presentations:

1. John Barrows

The first presenter that I saw at Rainmaker 2016 was John Barrows who is an inside sales expert and a very straight to the point individual. I respected his speech a lot because he was not afraid to tell the audience how it is. The funniest thing that he said in the speech was, “If you do not switch up your talk tracks in your sales role, you will want to jump out of the window within six months.”

This is so true though because all of us in the B2B space depend on our automation tools that we forget to add humanity into our work. We are reaching a point in our world that we are relying more on the machines than relying on our instinct. The meat of John Barrow’s talk consisted of him talking about different approaches to take to make yourself stand out from other inside salesmen. For example, John said that he did five highly personalized emails in the morning with his coffee. He said this was super affective because it had a high open and response rate. In the world of automation it pays off to be highly personable and prospect to people that are willing to chat about your product.

Stop being average and start being an expert salesperson.

2. Jacco van der Kooij

Jacco is one of the most energetic people I have ever seen on a stage. He had an intro video, outro video and a crazy amount of energy. I was surprised that I did not see fireworks start going off after his speech.

At the beginning, I honestly had no idea where Jacco was going with the presentation and I thought he was another hype man on stage. However, the deeper he went into the speech the more it started to make sense to me. I have been doing my BDR/SDR job for the past six weeks and I see why Inside Sales needs to do go to a Inside Sales 2.0 level as Jacco said. As I do the emails and calls, I realize that people do not respond to an outreach unless you are able to hold a valuable conversation and some level of personalization in your message.

Consumers now want valuable conversations and do not want cheesy sales pitches that do not benefit them in the long run.

3. Ralph Barsi

This was my 2nd favorite presentation that I attended at Rainmaker 2016 because Barsi was on point with every single answer. One of the great points that Barsi made was to understand the art and science of sales development.

There is an art to having conversations with your consumers, and science to crafting the proper emails to your prospects. In addition, Barsi talked about personal branding for salespeople. Think about it, if a prospect does not know you they will be less willing to listen to you. Create content, videos and connect with other peers in your industry to build your personal brand.

The biggest lesson that I learned is to invest into the art and science of sales development every day so that you can become the best at your craft.

4. Gary Vaynerchuk

Last but DEFINITELY not LEAST Gary Vaynerchuk. Guys, this was one of the best keynotes I have ever heard in my entire life. Gary pretty much rocked the faces off of the crowd of Rainmaker 2016 including myself.

He talked about why if you are not branding you will lose, how looking at the future is important and why the phone call is dying. Branding is super important in 2016 because so many people claim to be experts now a days with no brand behind them. With a strong brand, you are able to have more opportunities for yourself and people will trust you more.

Branding is the key reason that Gary has been so successful in the past years because people trust his advice. Also, Gary said looking into the future is important. When he first started doing email marketing his response rate for his newsletters were 90%. Now with everyone doing email marketing it is at 50%, which shows that you have to be ahead of the game to have the highest ROI. Also, Gary talks about how the phone is starting to become obeselete. He made the point loud and clear when he told everyone to stand up in the crowd who hated getting a random phone call. Every single person in the room stood up. It was truly insane.

He is right though we are going into an age where people hate answering their cell phone and an app will be made soon that does not let you call a person’s phone. The tip that hit home with me the most was Gary saying to start writing Medium post on your position and industry, so this is one of the reasons for this Medium post. Again, branding is key and if you are not doing it you may end up losing in the long run.

Conclusion:

All of these speakers brought different tips that I will be implementing as a SDR at my company at Terminus. I was blessed to be able to attend Rainmaker 2016 and learn from some of the best in the game. However, all these lessons are pointless without action. Take action today and make the best version of yourself to dominate your space.

If you attended Rainmaker 2016, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section. If you did not attend, what do you think of the article and the presenters thoughts on B2B sales?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!