How Bryan Hamblin Sells: Always Remember, It’s Not About You

Once Bryan Hamblin found out what a CRO was, he knew he wanted to become one.

He was first exposed to the position early in his career, during his consulting days. When he understood the key aspects of the job – leading a go-to-market team, with an emphasis on go-to-market strategy – he was motivated to do exactly that.

“I get excited about the types of problems that a CRO works on,” he said.

Mission accomplished. Successfully transitioning from consulting to sales, Bryan is now the CRO of Muck Rack, a PR and communications management platform used by the likes of Google, Spotify, Verizon, Pfizer, and many more.

What did Bryan learn on his way to CRO? How is he coaching his team to overcome today’s larger – and more cautious – buying committees? What’s the best piece of sales advice he ever got?

We asked him all of that and more in our latest edition of How I Sell:

1. What motivates you each day, even when you aren't feeling it?

The word I use — and I'm sure a lot of folks in the profession use it — is winning, but I'll use it through two lenses.

One, I love it when our customers win. We're really customer-obsessed and customer-focused here at Muck Rack. That's been a theme at a lot of the companies I've worked for, because that’s what drives me – I love it when our customers win.

The second lens is I love it when our employees win. I’ll give you an example – this morning, one of my account executives called me, and asked if I’d like to do some deal reviews at 6:30 a.m. PST.

I said absolutely. And when you come out of that call and you feel like your people are winning, your people are getting better, and you’re ultimately watching people succeed, that gives me a ton of energy.

I get a lot of satisfaction out of that. I feel like if I can go through my day feeling like I'm helping somebody grow and get better — that's pretty motivating for me on a daily basis. And usually it does happen on a daily basis, where I feel like I'm part of something that's helping our people or our clients get better.

2. What's your sales philosophy, in 3 sentences or less??

Be customer-obsessed, human-first, and very connected to the daily reality.

For number-one, think about the customer all the time and the outcomes they can achieve.

The second is something I picked up earlier in my career, and it’s this concept that you can be authentic, or what I call human-first, when you interact with people. You don’t have to be some sort of character; you can actually be a human being in the way you relate to people.

And the third is, in this role, you want to be connected to the field and really know what the realities are. If you sit up in some Ivory Tower, you aren’t connected to the realities of what your customer success and revenue teams are doing every day. And that can get you in trouble.??

For example, if you institute some process change without understanding the realities of the conversations happening at the field level, you can hinder your performance. A classic example is implementing an enterprise process that just doesn’t work the same for your SMB segment.

3. In today's noisy times, how are you encouraging your sales team to make their prospecting stand out?

That’s been a very hot topic since the start of COVID, all of this digital noise. There are a few ways we try to overcome it.

One is a framework we like to call 3Ms, which stands for message, messenger, and method.?The key is you need to mix up these components, such as changing the message (say something different), the messenger (e.g. have an exec reach out), or the method (e.g. use video instead of email).

Don't just send 100 emails; do a video. Try a social touch through LinkedIn. Pick up the phone, dare I say.

Alternate between your channels so you’re not just a one-trick pony for whatever cadence you’re most comfortable with. We even talk about prospecting on behalf of other people through shared connections. Involve others in your outreach. You don’t have to die alone, right?

We also talk a lot about this concept of offering value with no expectation of anything in return.

Yes, you can ask for a meeting. You can ask for time, but how about asking for nothing and just providing something of value? Here's a white paper. Here's the State of Journalism research that Muck Rack publishes to help inform your media strategy.?

People will often see that and appreciate it, get value from it, and come back to you organically. So sometimes the best thing is just to offer value without any expectation of anything in return. Honestly, I think that’s a great life principle as well. Give and don't expect to get all the time.

I encourage our teams to do their homework. Everybody says do your research. But we say do the homework that can really distinguish you from what I'll call the surface-level research that comes from reading a website or reading a bio. I’m talking about the deep stuff that really shows you understand prospects and customers.

To do that, you need to give your customers the answer to the assignment they didn’t even know they had. For example, in a meeting the other day, we were helping counsel a PR team about how they can best reach out to the right journalists and tell their story.

Then we started talking about competitive media monitoring and helping them understand their share-of-voice relative to their top five competitors. This was something that they didn't bring to us but they were immediately interested in it and curious how they were stacking up.

That’s bringing your customer the answer to the assignment they didn’t even know existed. Those are the types of things we're doing to stand out.

4. Buying committees are getting larger — and more cautious. What's the key to overcoming that?

I think there's a lot of consolidation happening, along with many other factors causing that.

To overcome it, everybody’s talking about problems or pain and that’s a big part of what all sellers do. But at Muck Rack, we talk about the implications of that pain and tying it to a critical business issue. So firstly, it’s not just saying, “Hey, I have a problem.” It’s quantifying what that problem is preventing the company from doing, and what strategic objective it’s linked to.

The second is, we talk about needing to speak multiple languages in the context of multithreading, meaning the language a manager uses is different from the language a director uses versus the language an end-user uses. You need to understand those different languages, because if you speak the wrong language to the wrong person, your message isn’t going to resonate. That’s incredibly important.

In addition, I do think you have to get creative in this environment. For example, can you find ways to share risk? Perhaps we’ll enter into a long-term agreement where we’ll take on more risk the first year, and then we’ll share more of the risk in year two and three.

Last, you need to provide your champions with really strong ROI modeling and justification for your spend. Because a CFO might just see a bunch of line items the company is spending money on and have to cut somewhere.

Where will they cut first – the one where the ROI is vague or one where there’s really strong, crystal-clear ROI? So it’s critical to help your champion create a really strong business case in 1-2 slides that shows why this investment is worth it.

5. What's the best piece of sales advice you've ever received?

My friend, colleague, and well-known sales trainer Skip Miller always said, “It’s not about you, Bryan.”? Unfortunately, Skip passed away very recently, and my heart goes out to his family.??

I think that really is the best piece of advice, when you realize it’s not about you. It’s not about the thing you’re selling.??

Yes, you have to give them information, you have to map it to their needs. But it’s really about the person and the organization you’re talking to.

That means, can you be a really good, authentic listener??

And I use the word authentic, because a lot of people listen, but they don’t really care. They’re thinking about the next step in their process or how they’ll move this deal along.

But, if you can authentically listen to what people are saying, then you become consultative. Then you become that problem solver.

You want to be seen as a trusted advisor, a problem solver, and to do that you have to realize it's not about you. You have to realize it’s about them and you have to listen to them authentically.

6. What do you look for when hiring a salesperson? Has it changed it all?

I think it depends on the company and situation. Some people say to always look for the same competencies, but I do believe it varies depending on the company you’re in and the stage you’re at.

For us, there’s a lot of benefit for the people we hire having some sort of PR background. It's not required, but people that have worked in PR and media relations really have empathy and understanding of the types of people we are talking with.

Beyond that, when we think about hiring, we create a competency framework, where we look for specific skills. For me, I look for seven things consistently:

• Coachability. Are they coachable? Are they adaptable? Can they absorb and learn and modify their approach?
• Intellectual curiosity. This to me is a form of intelligence. Are they naturally curious? Do they ask good questions and do they listen authentically?
• Page and energy. We call it LFG, or let’s freaking go. Do you have some energy and pace about you?
• Skill builders. The people we’re trying to hire are self-motivated skill builders. They acquire skills through enablement, of course, but also on their own. Are they reading industry news? Are they challenging themselves outside of work? Are they regularly having networking conversations? We want people who are constantly adding to their proverbial bag of skills.
• EQ. Can you read the room accordingly? Do you understand energy and react to it? That’s important.
• Demonstrated success. Can you talk about that success at a level of granularity beyond the numbers? What did you do? How did you contribute to that?
• Conciseness. I think being able to explain complex topics simply and succinctly is key. Can you take a complex topic that has a lot of nuance and deliver it succinctly? If needed, can you go into additional detail?

Follow-up question: which of those skills matters most?

I would say coachability. I think that's a really key component that I wouldn't sacrifice in any circumstance.

It's just so important for you to be able to pick up positioning and be able to learn and adjust if you have setbacks or failures. You need to always want to get better.

7. Is there any habit you have outside of work that you believe helps you perform better??

I’d say two things.

One is I’m a big walker. I like to get out and just walk.

I grew up in a very hot desert climate, so I’m a big warm-weather person, and I just love seeing the sunshine. So I just like getting outside and having undistracted walking time.?

And I try to get at least 10,000 steps in a day. Even if I’m stuck in my home office, I have a treadmill under my desk that’ll walk on.?

The second is I have two daughters and I coach female youth sports. If you want to talk about dealing with change management and objection-handling and managing different types of energy, go coach 6-to-10-year-olds in softball, basketball, or really anything.

Coaching has helped me a ton on how to adapt to a situation, how to teach something to someone who absorbs it in a different way than someone else and how to build team camaraderie toward a common goal.

Coaching is a great personal release for me, but it’s also very practical in that it helps me build skills, even if I’m not aware of it in-the-moment.

8. What has been your biggest failure in sales and how did that experience transform you?

I’ve failed a lot, and I say that in a good way, because I think you have to try things. But there’s one story that jumps out.

Before Muck Rack, I worked for a company in the tech space, where we were doing large outsourced managed services. These were one-to-two-year sales cycles and you’re talking about $15 million annual contracts.

As part of the process, clients would visit these centers we had where our operational staff worked. They were full-day visits, and we’d plan every last detail. Who are they going to talk to when they walk the floor? Who are they going to visit with? What are the case studies? Where are we going to dinner??

We were great at planning what an ideal outcome would look like, but what I didn’t do at the time was think through, what if this meeting goes horribly wrong? What does a negative outcome look like?

On one occasion, we planned?one of these site tours with a client who said they only wanted to talk operations. They didn’t want to talk pricing or the deal; only operations.

After the tour, which went great,?the client threw a curveball and said right that they wanted to talk about the deal. We were totally unprepared because all we prepped for was the operations aspect.

My team did what we had to, which was to sidebar for an hour. Ultimately, we put something together and had a good conversation, but that hour was extremely stressful.

Here’s what I learned from it. Yes, it’s great to think about what the ideal outcome is, but also, be sure to think through what a terrible outcome could look like. Anticipate both, so when you walk into any meeting, you are fully prepared.

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