S2E28 - Amy Franko | Cultivating The Modern Seller Mindset & Skill Set

Change Your Mindset

My guest today is Amy Franko, who is a strategic sales expert, author, and keynote speaker. Amy had a successful business-to-business sales career with global technology companies like IBM and Lenovo before, in 2007, she pivoted into entrepreneurship and launched the training firm Impact Instruction Group. Now, Amy works with professional service firms, helping them grow business development results and build firm leaders.

Amy also recently released a book, The Modern Seller, which is not a book about prospecting or negotiating skills. It's a book that explores the five skill sets that individuals and organizations need in order to become successful. In this episode, Amy explains each one of these skill sets in great detail, focusing on how they apply to the financial service industry. However, no matter what industry you're in, the ability for you to develop these five skill sets is crucial in the disruptive business environment that we are operating in today.

So, let’s dig into the five skill sets of The Modern Seller....

A modern seller is agile.

Until the last decade or so, “agility” was something that you heard about in sports and athletic training, not a business concept.

According to the Center for Creative Leadership, which does research on the top skills that organizations are looking to hire for and build, agility really popped onto the radar about 10 years ago. And they think that, by 2022, things like adaptability and versatility are going to be in the top five skills that organizations are looking to hire for.

Amy says that they are also skills that we need to be thinking about when it comes to business development and growth – because our clients are expecting that of us! They're expecting us to show agility as professional organizations, and in order to do that, we have to be developing agility in ourselves.

A modern seller is entrepreneurial.

Whether you're a manager, a senior manager, or someone at the highest level in your organization, look at yourself and look at the people in your firm. Do they see themselves as employees, or do they see themselves as the founder and the CEO, maybe the chief bootstrapper, in their own book of business?

Because there’s a big difference there. When an employee thinks of their book of business or their team's book of business as a business itself, they make different decisions. They look at the top line and the bottom line, and they look for the best opportunities.

So, we want to have people in our organization that are thinking entrepreneurially because that's what's going to help us grow.

Now that you know what a modern seller is, are you ready to become one?

Then you’re going to need to take some action.

So, what’s the next step in the pursuit of becoming a modern seller for you? Which of these five skill sets have you best developed? Which of the five skill sets is your weakest? Will you build on a strategy of strengthening your weakest and leveraging your strongest?

Devise a strategy and work on it every single day, even if it’s just for 30 to 60 minutes. It takes baby steps in order to change a habit.

“You can go to a training, you can read a book, but the switch has to be in the application; applying things, trying them, failing at them, and moving forward. That's the only way that we learn.”

Resources:Learn more at amyfranko.comRead: The Modern Seller: Sell More And Increase Your Impact In The New Sales EconomyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyfranko/Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmyFranko