When I started at Boston College, my goal was to become a doctor. Like many college students, I strayed from my planned path and left school with a degree in Economics and began my career selling SaaS (software as a service) for Gryphon Networks.
My inspiration to become a doctor stemmed more from a desire to help people rather than an eagerness to work with the human body.
I wanted to determine and then implement appropriate solutions for both known and unknown problems.
This drive to help, by finding and solving pain-points (no pun intended), has driven me to think of my former role as a Business Development Representative and now my current position as an Account Executive in a very different light in comparison to the traditional sales mindset.
A couple of months into my BDR role, the novelty of working in an office faded and so set in the monotony of making 300+ cold calls and sending hundreds of emails each week.
Demoralized by the lack of their success, some of my more senior peers had burned out. A trend that seemed prevalent across all business development teams I’d encountered.
I started to feel that I was just annoying people on a daily basis and my appointments were sheer luck when I either caught a nice guy or connected with someone at exactly the right moment.
Overall, the work was grueling, unrewarding, old-fashioned and irritating to me and many of my prospects. I needed to figure out a way to change my outlook or I would have to change my career path.
It was when I was seriously reconsidering the thought of starting the med school track again that I came up with the idea of being an “Outbound Doctor.”
Although Outbound Doctor is not my official title, it’s what I have been striving to be. The purpose of this role isn’t to set appointments or close business to fulfill a quota. Instead, it is about strengthening and, in some cases, possibly saving companies that have issues for which I (Gryphon Networks) have the remedies.
Essentially, my prospecting process involves looking for and recognizing symptoms of company illnesses that I believe our products can cure.
I have found that it is a lot harder to be an outbound doctor vs. a traditional “inbound” doctor due to differences in credibility and the client’s acknowledgment and knowledge of the problem at hand.
More often than not, a medical patient will see a doctor with recognition of their health problem, an idea of what that problem might be, trust that the doctor has the best solution and is willing to pay for the suggested treatment.
As an Outbound Doctor, I am calling people with no prior credibility to suggest they have an issue, then offering a way that we can fix it and finally get them to actually take (buy) my suggested solution.
In short, what I hope I’m doing is convincing people to let me help them, which sounds funny, but it’s true. People say, “Thank you” to doctors after a successful course of action is taken; I want my clients to be thankful for my diagnosis and eventual fix after a successful implementation.
Although being an Outbound Doctor may be difficult, my work is certainly rewarding and I have become more successful. My day-to-day now consists of searching for potential patients who I believe have a pain-point (or multiple) that Gryphon has the tools to fix.
Obviously, my company does not hold the cure to every problem, so I must determine who can truly benefit from our solutions before reaching out instead of wasting time reaching out to the wealth of companies that do not need Gryphon’s solutions.
Once connected, so begins the fun of diagnosing companies’ problems and determining and explaining which medicine (our suite of sales performance products) will be the remedy for their ailments.
Sales is a means of helping others rather than satisfying a salesman’s greed. This will improve motivation and help qualify and close at a deeper and more personal level by focusing more on the problem and less on the product.
Adhering to this methodology has produced great results for my customers, Gryphon Networks, and my personal growth. I believe it should be the mission of all sales professionals to ensure that all three of the aforementioned entities benefit from our work.
Trying to help these companies can be difficult because of opposition to change and lack of trust, but as Gryphon “heals” more client problems, we hope to become more of a traditional team of inbound doctors as a result of referrals and word of mouth. I’m confident that we can achieve this.
If you would like to learn how I can help you increase your sales team’s performance by 20% or more click here!