Study Your Craft & Your Prospect to Win Deals: Morgan J. Ingram
Morgan J. Ingram didn't always want to work in the sales industry. Marketing was the initial path he expressed interest in, but as they often do, plans changed. After graduating from college, Ingram began his career as a sales development representative at Terminus in Atlanta, GA. He excelled in this position, going on to become a Manager.
The online content he created around sales development led to his eventual recruitment by John Barrows to a training role. During the three and a half years of sales training Ingram completed full-time, he trained companies like Slack, Salesforce, Google and Zoom on prospecting. These days, Ingram focuses on content creation and B2B influencer marketing. For him, things have come full circle.
How can leaders support their SDRs?
While there are many great sales books, Ingram says the person he studied who helped him become an excellent first-time leader and continue focusing on leadership is John C. Maxwell, who wrote The Five Levels of Leadership.
Ingram applies the following questions to his approach:
How are you actively helping out your team?
Are you going to reps and making sure they are doing the right cold call or sending the right emails?
How are you making sure that they do that in the right way?
Give SDRs frameworks that are consistent and scalable. Ingram says the focus is on how you elevate those salespeople. He has seen some people come into organizations and have no internal enablement or system to be successful.
"If you look at every successful company – from the Coca-Colas of the world to the Home Depots of the world – they have a system that has allowed them to be successful."
He goes on to say, "You continuously activate and focus on that system so that you can get success."
Support people by getting involved with them. Referencing his time as a manager, Ingram says he sometimes made cold calls with SDRs and wrote responses to emails for them to offer support to his team.
What are some sales best practices and some outdated ones to avoid?
Ingram advises applying the concept of inverse thinking. "If something were to be awful, what would that look like? What would be the worst thing I could do?"
Avoid doing these things:
A connect and pitch
Writing a long email
Sending a lengthy video (around three minutes)
Sending a message that's just you pitching your product
Following up and saying "touching base" or "checking in"
When trying to improve the sales process, do this:
Write shorter emails
Make more concise videos
Don't connect and pitch
Ask thoughtful questions
Find ways to break up the noise
Ingram views video as a great way to create a human touch and help you stand out. He says studying your buyers and your customers helps create more personalized messages. He is also a fan of voice notes on LinkedIn with first-degree connections.
How do you demonstrate knowledge of or interest in a prospect you contact?
He suggests asking yourself how you can find obstacles that someone had in a case study and how you can present solutions. You can execute this in many ways, such as screen-sharing videos, walking through a blog post or article, and identifying opportunities to help based on your information.
Speaking your buyer's language is another of Ingram's approaches.
"Pay attention to prospects' digital assets, including podcasts or YouTube channels, and pay attention to how they use the words that they have and what they're saying and then correlate that to your messaging."
What are some books you recommend?
The Law of Success
Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended on It
Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition
Consistency Selling: Powerful Sales Results. Every Lead. Every Time.
Tell Us About The SDR Chronicles and the current show you host, Muffins with Morgan.
The SDR Chronicles is a series of videos available on YouTube that offer a personal look into the ups and downs he faced during his career. With the series, he aimed to create a community and provide content people would get something out of. The SDR Chronicles helped him grow his LinkedIn following to what it is today and served as a catalyst for the work he has done since.
Muffins with Morgan is born out of the desire to educate others and a healthy dose of love for Saturday mornings spent watching cartoons with his siblings. Ingram has cultivated an involved community around his live show. In each episode, Ingram analyzes pieces of entertainment and places a sales spin on the material. There is also a Q&A portion of the show that sees participants ask the expert and marketer questions related to sales success.
What are some takeaways you would give someone new to the sales industry?
His advice includes finding three content creators and obsessing over how they go about their day-to-day. Ingram also says to figure out what these content creators' skills are and what they are doing that you are not.
He also suggests creating a skills report card and assigning yourself a letter grade. As you grow in self-awareness, you will continue to evolve and improve your skills.
Ingram says people often waste time listening to podcasts but not executing what they've learned. Instead, he suggests finding three nuggets, at minimum, out of every single podcast and implementing them into your life.
Where can people follow you online?
You can find Morgan J. Ingram online across social media channels and LinkedIn. Sign up for his newsletter here.