How Ryan Walsh Sells: The Most Important Trait is Curiosity

Ryan Walsh?joined?ChannelAdvisor?on its first day, in July of 2001. He stayed there for 15+ years, rising from sales executive to sales director to eventually becoming its Chief Revenue Officer.?

The company rose in that time as well, from a North Carolina-based startup to a public company, with 230+ sellers and revenues exceeding $100 million annually. In March of 2017, he ended his successful run, and dove into the world of entrepreneurship.

Since, he’s launched?RepVue, which aims to help sales pros know what it's like to sell for the world's most well-known sales organizations. RepVue has detailed profiles of thousands of sales orgs on their site based on data submitted from verified users who work in those orgs, and it's all totally free for sales professionals.?

What has Ryan learned in a career first focused on leading a sales team, and now, as the founder of his own sales-focused business? We sat down with him to find out for our latest edition of?How I Sell.?

1. What do you love most about selling?

Over the course of my career, what I’ve enjoyed the most is not necessarily selling. But instead, as I grew into leadership roles, it was really helping sellers build a career that’s meaningful to them.?

What I love about sales as a profession is it's so life-changing for so many people. At RepVue, we’re able to help sellers find the right roles for them at scale. That’s something I’m passionate about.?

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

It’s ABC – always be curious.

Curiosity, for me, is the number-one trait in a salesperson.

3. Is there anything that makes your sales process unique?

What’s unique about our sales process at RepVue is we don’t do outbound.

Right now, all the business we do is inbound, because we have a network effect with salespeople sharing it with each other. And we don’t have an awareness problem because we have so many people coming to us organically.?

That’s unique, and it won’t always stay that way – we’ll do outbound eventually. Although, even then, we’ll be aided by the awareness we’ve built.?

4. What are the top sales trends you’re tracking?

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a huge influx of venture capital dollars into tech. And it’s created a problematic effect where it drives these companies to grow beyond what they would or should do, and it’s put a lot of pressure on these companies to hire more salespeople.?

What we’re seeing is that the product-market fit for these tech companies is growing, but not as fast as their headcount growth. And what we’ve seen, particularly over the last 6-to-9 months, is that the percentage of salespeople attaining their quota is dropping. Month over month over month, in every position, we’re seeing fewer reps hit their quota.

Too many companies got over their skis because of the pressure to grow, and salespeople were treated like a number on the spreadsheet. The CFO says each sales head we hire adds $318,000 to the top line, so let’s just hire a million of them. But that’s not how it works, every company hits an inflexion point where the total addressable market can only support a certain amount of salespeople.?

Because of the influx of VC dollars, we’re seeing many companies all hit that inflexion point at the same time. Because of that, we’ve seen less hiring in the last six months and pullbacks in spending across the board.

I think that will level out over the next 12 months, we’ll get back to the equilibrium, although there will be some pain in the interim. We’re also watching how this effects funding, particularly funding in tech, and the sales industry overall.?

5. What excites you most about the future of sales??

In the last few years, sales leaders have focused more on culture, and there’s been an explosion of tools created to solve for this as well. What excites me moving forward is the ability of salespeople to be supported in their roles with enablement, with tools, and by recognizing the mental health challenges of salespeople as well.?

In years past, working as a salesperson, you almost felt like you’re sitting on an island out there – make or break.?And now, it’s feeling more supported and engaged across the company. The enablement and support of salespeople in their roles is increasing, which is making for a better selling experience.?

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

I have two teenage kids. Raising them has really helped improve my patience, improve my listening, and improve my empathy as well.

With the pandemic and virtual school and all of that, it’s only further built my patience, my listening, and my empathy. Those are all great traits for sales. So just being a parent has made me a better leader and seller.

7. How do you use LinkedIn when selling?

We love it.?

I tell my team all the time – if you can build a personal brand on LinkedIn, it’s a great advantage. And it’s something you can take and own your whole career – your company doesn’t own that, you own that. So it can help each individual.

In terms of selling specifically, for me, it’s awareness and credibility. You can’t build credibility by posting on LinkedIn necessarily, you build credibility by what you do and the insights you gain, and then you can leverage that expertise and share it on LinkedIn.?

I encourage all our employees to post about their expertise. If you are in customer success, share what you’ve learned in customer success. Not everyone does it, and not everyone has to do it, although it’s a great way to build your brand and credibility.

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

When I look back at when I was a CRO, there were always challenges we needed to work through – no sales org is perfect. But one challenge I couldn’t solve was attrition.?

Our attrition was always around 20-to-25% in the US, and probably around 30-to-35% for our global teams. I know many other sales teams were going through the same thing, but I took that personally. Every time someone left, I felt like I didn’t serve that person well enough to get them to stay.

That’s defined what I’ve done since I was a CRO, which is how do we help sales professionals find a role where they will be a fit. And how do we help companies find the right fits as well.

Because there are many times where a salesperson might take a job without full transparency into what it’s really like to work in that sales organization. And when expectation is off from reality, it leads to disappointment. When that gap is bigger, the disappointment is going to be bigger. So, we try to close that gap by providing what reality actually is at these companies.

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