February 21, 2022

February 21, 2022

3 min read

Welcome back to The Weekly Pitch! Our mission is to cover news, offer insights, and profile rising stars in the sales community.

Our Leaderboard today profiles Grant Bordine. He's the VP of Business Development for Felux, a tech startup on a mission to create the world's largest online marketplace to buy and sell steel.

Then in The Closer, G2 came out with its top 100 best software products list. We know how to spot a winner and link back to three sales stars we profiled from these top companies.

Let's start with our Weekly Chart.

To follow up on those calendar screengrabs from last week's feature story on win rates, we thought it might be helpful to break down how high-performing sellers optimize an entire 40-hour work week.

• Prospecting – commit to 10 hours a week adding new contacts to our CRM, cold calling, emailing, LinkedIn messaging, video messages.

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• Customer Meetings – aim for 12 hours a week, including research and pre-meeting prep, in-meeting time, post-meeting follow-up, CRM data entry.

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• Pipeline Management – spend 10 hours a week moving deals through each sales stage, multi-threading, coordinating future meetings, deal reviews with peers and our manager, real-time forecasting, and updating our CRM.

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• Skill Development – learn for 8 hours a week in team huddles, 1:1 coaching from our manager, boot camp training, and self-directed learning.

Making Steel Sexy

Fresh off a seed round of $5.1 million, Felux wants to disrupt the world of steel and how it's bought and sold. And its head of business development is helping the company do just that with a unique set of skills and experience.

Grant Bordine spent over ten years in the steel and metals industry, selling to manufacturers across the country. Now he’s revolutionizing the industry with technology.

Here’s a look at what he’s learned along the way:

Get gritty

I started my sales career at Enterprise. Picking up customers, cleaning cars in my suit, and selling insurance to a demanding audience taught me what real life was like and how to develop relationship-building skills.

Learn by networking

Breaking into an unknown industry was challenging. I didn’t know anything about steel, let alone its impact on the overall economy. What helped me was learning from peers by asking lots of questions, and what I found was people were receptive to someone eager to learn.

Master your craft by turning around and teaching it

While I leaned a lot on peers and networking, I loved taking what I learned and sharing the information with others. Teaching others helps you analyze, adjust and accelerate your process and strategy.

Be flexible with your management style

As I moved into a leadership role, I focused on being flexible and finding solutions creatively. I’d ask myself, “how would I like to be managed?” while getting to know people’s ambitions, “what’s their motivation?”

When cold calling, remember we’re all humans

The person on the other line is a person, too.

Break your prospects’ status quo

Selling into steel is hard. It’s hard to tell prospects, “just because it’s worked the past 30 years doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it this year.” Helping people realize a better way requires getting their story and then showing them how to accelerate that and become a long-term solution.

Again, people you’re prospecting are people, too

If they know you have genuine intentions in mind, they’ll want to do business with you. Build relationships because we all know referrals convert.

Connect with Grant

Today’s feature story is an inspiration for anyone looking to parlay their knowledge from a non-traditional sector like steel and move into B2B tech sales.

Keep an eye on Grant and Felux as he builds up the industry for the greater good. Connect with him on LinkedIn!

Best Software Products for 2022

Popular review site G2 recently released its Top 100 list of software products for 2022. Some notables include three companies, each with a rising star in sales, profiled by The Weekly Pitch in previous issues:

• #1 Gong (Laura Rehn profile)
• #23 Hootsuite (Gia DeRose video profile)
• #79 Lattice (John Sherer profile)

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