How John Barrows Sells: Most of All, You Must Believe

When you look at the list of organizations John Barrows has trained through his company, JB Sales, you might as well be looking at a list of the top tech companies in the world.

Here’s just a partial sampling: Meta. Salesforce. IBM. Google. Workday. Shopify. Gong. And, yes, Microsoft and LinkedIn.

John is also one of the world’s most prominent sales influencers, being named a “game-changing influencer” by Salesforce, one of the top 30 social salespeople in the world by Forbes, and – with north of 390k followers on the platform – a LinkedIn Top Voice.

John learned sales the hard way, “falling into it like everyone else,” cutting his teeth early in his career selling copiers to the government for Xerox (“That’s where I first learned solution selling,” he said.)

Since, he’s started and sold his own startup to Staples, worked as Jack Welch’s VP of sales, served as advisor to several emerging companies and, of course, launched JB Sales, which has been his full-time gig since 2013.

What’s the philosophy that guides John’s world-class training? We’ll dive into our latest edition of How I Sell to find out.?

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

This is a tough one, because sales is a brutal job.

To use a baseball analogy, if you hit .300 in baseball, you are going to the Hall of Fame. Meaning, if you are successful three-out-of-ten times, you are great. And they talk about baseball players facing a lot of rejection.

Well, in sales, if you bat .020 – meaning, you are successful 2% of the time – when you are prospecting, you are going to the Hall of Fame. It’s ridiculous how bad the rejection is.

And so, for me, I think a lot of it has to do with belief. I think the most important trait for any sales rep to have is a belief in what they do.

If you don’t believe in what you do, this is a brutal profession. You could make some money for a short period of time, but I don’t think you can last. But, if you genuinely believe in your product or your service and it ties back to your why, then every “no” is just one step closer to finding someone you can help.

Also, I don’t take things personally. I know that rejection has nothing to do with me as a person. They either didn’t need my solution or it’s just an opportunity to get better.

And so believing in what I do because it ties to my why and not taking things personally is what makes it so I can get up each day and fight the good fight.

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

Believe in what you do. Always get better. And make it happen.

On “believe in what you do”: if you don't believe in what you do, then go find something else to do. Because the people that don't believe in what they do, they're the ones who give the profession of sales a bad name.

So this one I think is the most important.

On “get better every day”: I have a 1% philosophy, which is every day, just try to get 1% better. If you focus on continual improvement and learning something new every day, you’re going to get so much better over time.

On “make it happen”: I’m not a genius, I just work hard. If you're not willing to put in the work, what are you doing? Sales is not one of those professions where you can punch in at 9 a.m. and punch out at 5 p.m. and think that you're going to be successful doing it. You need to put in the work.

3.?How are you seeing buyers changing today and how are you advising sellers to adapt to that change?

We’ve all seen the stats that by the time someone comes to us today they’re already 60%-to-70% of the way through the sales process. And I agree.

So the client has a lot more knowledge. And that's why sales reps talking about features, functions, and speeds today is pointless.

That is not our job as sales professionals anymore. Google took that away from us a long time ago.?

Instead, I go back to something that struck me while reading “The Jolt Effect.” It said that yes, “no decision” is our biggest competitor. Which is true, most of us lose to “no decision” versus any direct competitor.

But what “The Jolt Effect” found is that it’s not actually no decision, it’s indecision. It’s indecision because there are too many options for clients and its analysis paralysis. And they don’t want to decide because people don’t get fired for not making a decision, they get fired for making the wrong decision.

So now our job is to de-risk the decision for them.

There are some tactical things a rep can do here. The first is we’re always really good at reverse-timeline selling. Meaning, you want this by January 1st, we need to do this, this, and this to hit that deadline.

Now you need to show the impact of not deciding by that date. Find out what the real business impact is if they don’t go forward by that date, so they understand that.

And then ask them what a bad decision looks like. For example, ask them, of the three vendors you are looking at, say you pick the wrong one. What does that mean for your business?

That’s where the real truth comes out.

Because we want to paint this beautiful, euphoric picture of what the future will look like if the client goes forward with our solution. But nobody believes in the euphoric future. Instead, you need to understand what their worst-case scenario is, and determine steps you can take together to avoid that.

Once you know that, you can de-risk the situation. And that makes them much more likely to move forward.

That’s really what the job of a sales rep is today. It’s to consolidate all the information that’s out there and help the customer make the right decision by, in part, helping them reduce the risk in their minds of making any decision.?

4.?How can sellers best make their prospecting stand out?

A couple of ways.

First is what I’ll call the “give a (crap)” factor. You have to care at this point because artificial intelligence is quickly taking over the quantity game.?

Soon, AI will do legit personalization at scale. The volume game, it’s going to get worse no matter how personalized your email is. So, you really have to take a step back and lean in on quality over quantity.

And that comes down to believing in what you do.

Another is calling isn’t dead. Calling is part of the overall strategy. Because, at this point, sales reps need to act as mini-marketers.

Marketers know it takes many touchpoints to convert a lead. Same with sellers. So there’s a call, there’s an email, there’s an InMail and a LinkedIn connection. That way the person knows me and can get back to me in the way they want to communicate with me.

Last, I tell reps to pick out their top accounts. And I’ll ask them, other than their demographic information, what about that company gets you excited?

Is it their values? Is it what they do? The market they serve?

Find that genuine reason, because once you find that you stop seeing that account as just a number or a cadence or a phone you have to call. Now, instead, your messaging comes alive; it’s authentic, it’s genuine.

And that’s one thing AI can’t do. AI can’t do genuine, period.

If you have a genuine reason for wanting to connect with someone and you put together a multi-touch strategy that adds value, now you have a legit chance of building a relationship.

5.?Do you have a preferred closing technique?

I think it’s important to understand closing techniques.

When I first learned about them, I thought it was 1980s “Wolf of Wall Street” crap. But the cool thing about learning closing techniques is it allows you to be proactive, instead of reactive.?

Because the biggest thing I always tell reps is, when it comes to closing, you have to have a plan. Knowing a variety of closing techniques helps you come up with the right plan for the right person.

I’ll give you an example. Myself, I actually want to be hard closed. If you soft-close me, I get annoyed. Just ask me the question. But, if you try to hard close other people, they’ll run away.

The closing technique I personally use most often is the trial close. That’s where we work backwards from the result the client wants, and then agree to certain steps along the way.

But I don’t limit myself to only the trial close or only the indirect close or only the assumptive close. There is no perfect closing technique. It is all situational and person based.?

By understanding a wide range of techniques, you understand which technique to use in each situation.

6.?Do you have a habit outside of work that helps you perform better??

My morning routine helps me get mentally and physically right.

Every morning, I do 30 minutes of working out. It could be pushups or sit-ups or whatever, just something to get my blood flowing.

And then, I do 10 minutes of morning affirmations, just to get myself in a gratitude mindset.

I’m also very dedicated to my gratitude journal. I end every day with gratitude; I write out all the things I’m grateful for that day.

The reason why is I think it’s easy to get in a negative mindset. We have to force ourselves to see the positive, even if it’s small things like someone opening a door for me or hitting all the green lights on the way home or someone sending me a text who I haven’t heard from in a long time.

Those little things start to compound on each other from a positive standpoint and move me in the right direction.?

7.?What's the best piece of sales advice you've ever gotten?

It’s, “Sales is the transfer of enthusiasm.”?

You have to find people that fit that bill and you can transfer that enthusiasm to. Because people still buy on emotion and back it up with facts; that’s just human nature.

And again, this comes back to believing in what you do. If you don’t believe in what you do, there’s no way you can get someone else excited about it.?

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

I think failure is relative, right? It’s only a failure if you don’t learn something. And I think I’ve learned from each one.

If you had to pin me down, my biggest what others would perceive as a “failure” was being fired from Staples.

Some background. I was head of sales for a startup and built it up over the course of seven years, to the point it was acquired by Staples, which was great. And then, Staples gave me a big job there.

What I realized quickly though was I wasn’t a big company, “corporate” guy.?

But I didn’t want to give up, I wanted to keep fighting. In my head, I wasn’t going to lose.

Despite that, they ended up firing me and it devastated me because I’ve never been fired before in my life. Here, I took this company from nothing to this incredible organization, but I couldn’t make it work in Staples.

After I got fired, it was devastating. But I woke up three days later and I realized it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt this massive weight come off of me and I was free.

I went back to the guy who fired me to get some feedback afterwards. He ran a $12-billion part of Staples. I told him I didn’t want the job back. I said, for my own personal development, I want to know what happened.

He said, “John, get in here. The fact that you even asked that tells me more about you than I knew in the year working with you.”

He then gave me an hour of his time and, frankly, that was my MBA. I learned more in that hour than I have ever learned in any business conversation I've ever had.

Fast forward a few years and I had this opportunity to work with Jack Welch for his new online startup. I was going to be the VP of Sales for it.

When Jack Welch needed a reference, I gave him the name of Jay, who was the guy from Staples who fired me. And Jay told Jack – “if you don’t hire John Barrows, you are an idiot.”

For that reason, I got to work for Jack Welch, Forbes’ CEO of the century. Because I got fired from Staples.

So I go back to saying nothing is a failure if you don’t learn from it. Because from that whole situation, I learned more and got more out of it than anything else in my career.

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