Matt Doyon

With nearly 2 decades in sales, Matt Doyon has held roles across a full spectrum including BDR, Inside Rep, Outside Rep, Account Manager, Team Manager and VP.  While not leading the sales team as CRO of Rock Content, Matt also has the full time roles of husband and father of 3.

JB: How did you get into sales?

• Way back into sales - formally started in 2004 in Print Media Advertising sales 
• Understanding problems you see around you and how to solve them 8 years old, bucket soap and sponges to make some extra $$ to buy baseball cards
• Identify prospects in the neighborhood who has a car? Who’s car is dirty? Car is there, so they are home. He has a solution to work with them. Cold calling, opening up prospects, asking for the $$, digging into pain 
• Interviewing for sellers and sales roles, that’s the kind of experience that can help someone be really effective. 
• Any profession is a LIFESTYLE choice - why would you do it?
• Has to be a degree of shamelessness, have to be willing to ask questions, be comfortable to talk about $$$
• Most of the sales skills aren’t natural, but are nurtured at a young age, what have our parents taught us?  What are their early experiences to understand their past to see if they are really doing something they want to do 

JB: If you don’t have some of these core drivers and skills. Have you seen this is why some folks struggle in sales?

• Love Challenger Sale, Challenger Customer, Miller Heiman - Great content and great learning - that is PRESCRIPTION INFORMATION - you first need to UNDERSTAND THE PROBLEM
• What is the underlying root cause of this issue? How do we attack that?
• Talk a lot on our team about FEAR, especially SOCIAL FEAR.  They will give you the skills/tactics but if you can’t understand where your anxiety comes from, how to communicate, what’s appropriate what’s not?  Let’s talk about the psychology of where the problem comes from then we can build the polish with objection 
• Psychology of sales hasn’t been promoted much in the past. 
• Sales is expected to DELIVER RESULTS NOW 
• Oftentimes, Sales gets sucked into this paradigm to GO GO GO to get results and don’t take time to look internally, be introspective, take a breathe and think long-term
• Sales teams are typically the highest compensated in an organization - not typically asked to think about the long-term gains you can get by investing in personal and self development.  What will make you better a year from now? EXECS want you to be better NOW, this quarter, week, month. 
• To change the trajectory of our performance in sales is thinking long-term. Think about our habits and behaviors that may not yield great results NOW, but will pay off over the long term!
• Very focused on Pleasure in the moment as a species. Always looking to satiate the immediate desire NOW
• Sales people love the thrill of the kill, the win, they want the deal in now and don’t necessarily 
• The Score Takes Care Of Itself - Bill Walsh
• Long-term mindset sacrifice some results today for better results tomorrow - have internal buy-in
• Lead by example, don’t just believe in it, but act that way as a leader
• Thing that you can bake into your own internal development so you can improve and show it for others 
• Management, leadership and coaching courses 
• Sales Manager is one of the least prepared, least trained jobs in the business world
• You can have great mentors, leaders and people to learn from but IT TAKES TIME
• Act in a way you want others to act and be vocal about it
• Set-up a structure for your team so they can invest in their own skill building - set time for growth
• Follow a coaching agenda and formula that should have a long term focus looking for distinct and specific skills that build short term skills and go to long term goal
• Focus on 20 things and then break them down and focus on 1 at a time

JB: What is that skill many people haven’t developed that makes them successful at sales?

• • Idea of ongoing skill building is the biggest IDEA people need to be working on.  Your skill building never ends, they will get rusty over time. 
  • Something you may do well now can lose its’ veneer and 
  • you have to be a vigilant gardener of your ripe skills, cleaning out weeds, nurturing material and staying on top of it
  • Learning and skill building NEVER ENDS - look at the best in sports and how they find coaches, ongoing growth and development of putting in the work
  • Philosophy of continuing to work on something every day and every week
  • Take all the different skills of what drives success - found 36 skills - refreshed to 50 - now to 100 smaller elements that sellers need to have excellent and mastery for all the time for any conversation we’re thrusted into
  • You may only use 5-10 for a certain sales process but the next deal might need a different set 
  • The first question we need to ask ourselves in Sales is; “Am I really committed to working on my skills to be ready for the next call that I might have?” 

JB: Talking about a growth mindset, how do you help look for that in hiring or build that with your team?

• • Growth Mindset - the ability to look at yourself as an ongoing work in progress
  • Fail Forward! Failure is part of the pathway to success
  • People can learn a growth mindset and exists in all of us
  • Someone in fixed mindset believing failure is permanent, can be changed if they have great coaching and great leadership
  • Test for ACCOUNTABILITY when you go through the HubSpot interview process- Great artists steal!
  • What have you failed at?  What did you learn from the last job that you would redo and do-over?
  • Get honest stories from your prospective hires to have self-awareness and realize they have gaps on their own game and not take it as an attack on their own character as they work through their journey
  • You can see someone is hurt by the question or uncomfortable talking about failure is a red flag for seeing someone may have a fixed mindset. 
  • How does someone take feedback during roleplay? Are they taking in the feedback and improving? 
  • People are wildly coachable with a growth mindset because they want to improve their own game to whatever the best way is
  • Interview process in roleplay 1. Run it and deliver feedback 2. Did you put some of the pieces of feedback into your second attempt? See if they are coachable or not?
  • What would you tell your earlier self to do differently?

JB: How do you stay connected and avoid getting an ego as a sales leader?

• Keeping in touch with your people, nothing will replace the personal conversations that you will have?
• Can’t get so lost in the data that people are only a data point
• Especially now in covid world, you must be proactive, reaching out to people and checking in to see how reps, BDRs and of course your direct reports are doing. 
• How’s it going? What’s working? What’s not?
• Allow for healthy conversation and healthy feedback where your team can challenge, create a culture of honesty so you can hear about the warts and ugliness so you can do your job!
• To a certain degree you have to do the job, Leaders shouldn’t carry quota, but doesn’t mean you totally divorce yourself from doing the job.
• Get a few leads from your BDRs to take a couple calls to lead by example and understand how that job is really tough and how you can do it yourself
• Have your reps pull you into key calls
• You can’t allow the excuse of priorities to have you completely abandon ship that are other priorities of the job
• You have to be a diligent time manager in a leadership role to understand the meaning behind the dashboards, the numbers, etc. 
• Comes down to SYSTEMS building as a manager or leader. Can’t be about one-offs and just that one victory except for maybe a fantastic hire 
• 50+ sales people on his team, not doing it to fuel the sales #, doing it to stay in connection with what that job really is, lead by example and show the team I’m willing to run the SYSTEM better, I can’t make excuses so neither can they

JB: Talk to me about some of the systems you build and utilize to be at your best?

• In order to do this we need to look at our systems and habits, the root cause as to why that happens. Why do things fail when they don’t take root in terms of building great habits?
• Technology can teach us a lot. What are the addictive apps we are using? Why visit Facebook 16 times a day? The game of the quarter understanding why people re so addicted to technology and psychology that we can learn from to get a head start on this so we can prime the pump to build better systems
• Brain science has come a long way with fMRI and MRI to learn what happens to their brain that drives a virtuous cycle
• Dopamine- pleasure seeking chemical, gamblers, etc. People that workout are there for the dopamine hit. People work out for a day because they feel great. 
• How do we simulate that dopamine high in the professional world in a positive light to change their behavior over time?  Then it becomes similar to going to the gym because you won’t feel you are living up to your potential. 
• Identify the goal is the beginning then what is the process you can get into the break the goal achievement down for daily outcomes - Long-term goal is destined for failure if you don’t have micro goals along the way, find small wins along the way to get the endorphin and dopamine hit
• How do I look at Skill building in a micro learning session and give people the thrill/dopamine hit to do that?
• Encourage team members to focus on skill development, run a score to see how people are doing? Who is practiced? Who is doing the best on skill building?  
• Tons of LMS systems to build and upload training to run reports. Use technology and the short term process to get to long term goals and hinge behavior and celebrations over small wins!
• Facebook doesn’t get us every day because I’m thinking about that person I want to have a conversation with in 3 months. What’s the latest message that has popped up in my inbox? Is someone out there hustling harder than me? It’s all about the immediate hit!
• We need to cater to the way people’s brains are wired, now that we know Neuroscience and biology, if you aren’t doing that today as a sales leader you are failing

JB: With learning and skill development hidden behind the scenes, people may be afraid to share where they are spending time. To highlight learning, development and growth help it become much more sustainable and successful. 

• • I talk a lot about working out and staying healthy.  Yes to have the energy to feel good, etc.  But whatever flavor it comes in, comes down to resistance.  Getting out of bed to go for a run, we may not want to do that but we get up and do it. Lifting weights IS RESISTANCE now we get into the mental exercise of doing physical exercise now helps change how we look at the world. You can overcome adversity when working out and you bring that same attitude philosophy to sales and your career. 
  • Ask a lot about sports performance, always somebody that can beat you in almost every case, you got humbled, probably had defeats and understand what it comes back from loss, you understand long term work drives long term results

JB: Talk to me about how you leverage Stoicism for your teams to perform at your best.

• Stoicism - Ryan Holiday - Marcus Aurelius - Epictetus, Greek and Roman philosophers
• Understand what parts of the world are controllable and what you can’t. Understand what parts of your life you can control. 
• Getting to a point where you are at peace with this dangerous, uncontrollable world that is around you all the time. And focusing on that world as far as what you can control. 
• Boston Guy, New England Patriots Fan- Huge comeback against the Falcons, a lesson in Stoicism, all the data shows you’re going to lose and what are you going to do?  Focus on the next play, do our best (because that’s what we can control), there’s only so much time left on the clock and focus on what we can do again and again and again to turn an INEVITABLE LOSS INTO AN UNHEARD OF WIN! 
• Lead by example, everyone is going to have down months, down quarters.  How do you handle it as a leader? Are you showing frustration and taking it out on the team? OR are you looking back on a loss to see what we can learn from it, apply those learnings to today, month quarter and focus on moving on to the next sale and what I can control!
• The world is a controllable and uncontrollable place- Your focus needs to be on those controllables, apply all of your effort and energy to be accountable to worry about the things you can control will reduce stress and harness your energy to focus on your outcomes

JB: Now Patriots are struggling and working to see, how do they focus on their next move. James Clear- winners and losers have the same goals, it’s about the systems and processes they put in place that differentiates them. 

• Monthly kickoff with their teams one slide he uses for every meeting is Belichick - “On to Cincinnati” (Pats got crushed in 2014, dynasty is over), on to the next game, focus on that! Super Bowl 51 - how does it feel, great! But 5 weeks behind in next season so have ground to make up - move on to what we can control and think about next year. Doesn’t matter if you had a great month or missed hard to DO in both scenarios!
• The masters out there, top notch A players enjoy the success and never relax. Enjoy success at the end of the month and then next day 7AM, right back at it

JB: Do you love winning or hate losing more?

• • RIGHT ANSWER= I LOVE WINNING- you’re positive mindset and you prime conversations with that great energy! But I don’t believe that for me. 
  • My reality is; I HATE LOSING. The losses weigh more heavily than the wins.  The losses stick around a lot longer and the gravity of a loss is much heavier than a win! 

JB: What does success mean to you?

• • Success comes down to a certain confidence and serenity that I am behaving in a way that I’m thinking of myself in quieter moments. -Cognitive dissonance
  • Psychological condition- Idea of who we believe we are and want to be. There’s a gap between not living up to our own expectations. 
  • I am RIGHT NOW, in the moment living up to the person that I claim and want to be when I’m thinking in an ideological scenario …..ethically, may be tough choices that could hurt you short term, but it’s the right thing to do….to actually do it!
    LIVE UP TO THE PERSON THAT YOU HOPE TO BE!
  • As long as we behave in the way our grandmother’s would want us to behave, we’re doing a great job. 

Matt is hiring like crazy right now!  Reach out to him to see if you could be a great addition to their team. 

Links:

Matt Doyon LinkedIn

Rock Content

Ryan Holiday

Marcus Aurelius- Meditations

The Score Takes Care Of Itself - Bill Walsh