Tired of outdated sales tactics that just don’t work anymore? The sales landscape has drastically changed, leaving sellers frustrated and buyers annoyed.

Join us on this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast as we welcome David Priemer, Sales Scientist, Founder of Cerebral Selling and author of the bestselling book Sell the Way You Buy. David’s unique background blends research science with real-world sales expertise, making him a highly sought-after consultant and author.

In this episode, David discusses the evolving landscape of sales leadership, sharing his journey from a research scientist to a top-performing sales leader. Learn the essential strategies for building trust and strong relationships within your team, coaching effectively, and navigating the challenges of modern sales.

David also reveals data-driven approaches crucial for success in today’s market. Packed with practical tips and actionable strategies, this episode will equip you to conquer the ever-changing sales landscape and transform your team’s performance!

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Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Then, keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Sales Scientist REVEALS how Sales Leadership has CHANGED

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome David Priemer.

David is known as a “sales scientist” and is a former research scientist turned sales expert and now a sought-after sales consultant and author. He has a successful track record leading sales teams at tech companies like Salesforce and is now the Founder and Chief Sales Scientist of Cerebral Selling. 

His unique science and empathy-based approach to driving revenue and talent growth has been featured in publications like Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Inc.

Get ready Conquerors for David Priemer coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

From Scientist to Sales Expert, Founding Cerebral Selling 

Jeff Tomlin: David Priemer of Cerebral Selling, how are you doing today? All the way from Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

David Priemer: We’re in the Great White North. Yeah, it’s great to be with you, Jeff. Thanks for inviting me.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, well, it’s fantastic to have you on. I’m pumped to dig into all things selling. But first, hey, I wanted to… You’ve got a really unique background and an amazing track record of success and growth through your career. Wonder if you could just talk through a little bit of the background, where you started, and how’d you get all the way to Cerebral Selling?

David Priemer: Well, the funny thing about sales is that everyone has an origin story ’cause no one gets into sales on purpose. So my background, I was a research scientist doing work in engineering at the university level and ended up joining a startup at the turn of the dot-com boom. 1999, 2000, startups were the thing to do. So I joined this little company. I was young, didn’t have any commitments. I’m like, “Oh, I’ll do this.” So I joined this company, there was 20 of us at the time. It was a software company based in Toronto. We ended up growing that business over the course of several years to 700 people, $100 million business. We IPO’d along the way, got acquired.I absolutely fell in love with sales, because to me it was like an engineering problem, so much to pick apart, so much nuance. When I said it like this, the customer got it. When I said it like this, they didn’t. All these variables. So I fell in love with sales. I ended up spending the next 20 years across four high growth tech companies. They all ended up being acquired, and my third startup was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. So I came over with the ship to Salesforce. I spent five awesome years there. I used to run small business sales for the Eastern US, before moving on to start number four. But through all that time I’ve been salesperson, number one, written the playbooks, I’ve been a VP of sales four times. I was troubled by the fact that people love to buy stuff, but they hate talking to salespeople. Even we, let’s say in sales, don’t like talking to salespeople. I started to realize that a lot of the tactics that my teams were using, especially for example at Salesforce, a very sales-centric culture, were not categorically ineffective, they were not unethical, but they were just things that when other people were trying to sell me using those tactics, I was having none of. So I said, “How can we bridge this gap? How can we help people execute this amazing, beautiful profession with passion, and conviction, and authenticity?” So I went back to my research science roots and I said, “Hey look, let me start picking apart the patterns by which people make purchasing decisions, how we execute in the field,” and I started to write and create content. I wrote for the Salesforce blog. My content ended up getting picked up by Forbes, and Entrepreneur, and all these outlets, and I said, “This is amazing. I should keep doing it.” Several years later I ended up with all of this content and I said, “You know what? This is obviously what I love to do most, is learn and teach the art and science of modern selling.” Because selling is such a nuanced profession and it changes every year. You think about selling last year, versus in the middle of the pandemic, versus pre-pandemic, it’s a whole different ball game. So I started my practice several years back called Cerebral Selling, gratefully published two best-selling books on sales and sales leadership along the way. I continue to learn, I continue to teach, and I love sales, so this is my passion.

Sales Leadership Evolves with New Challenges and Market Changes.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, let’s dig into the change that you’re talking about. Well first off, congratulations on all the success that you’ve had. It’s a tremendous journey that you’ve been on. So you said that it’s changing, and it’s changing every year. I wanted to dig into that a little bit then. What are some of the ways that the role of the sales leader has been changing, and what are some of the themes that you see people struggling with today that they might not have been struggling with so much in past years?

David Priemer: Well, there’s two elements to it. There’s the foundational sales execution, like what’s different? And then there’s also, on the leadership front, what’s different? Then these things are kind of related because there are certain problems with… Let’s say leaders are struggling with their sales operation. The question is, why? Some of it has to do with the market, some of it has to do with the demographics of sales teams today. One of the biggest challenges just with the former, and we’re kind of dealing with both, is there are so many more solutions on the market than there used to be. I always give this example, in the marketing technology space alone in 2011, there were 150 vendors. I don’t know if you follow this. In 2024, you know how many vendors there are in the marketing technology space, if you had to guess?

Jeff Tomlin: Oh, it’s hundreds of thousands.

David Priemer: Well, not hundreds of thousands, but there’s over 14,000. So this is like a compound annual growth rate in that solution space alone of 48 or 42%. So it’s a lot harder to compete when you find yourself in a sea of sameness with all these other solutions. And when you ask people, “Okay, what does your product do?,” they’re like, “Oh, we help people reduce cost, improve efficiency.” You sound the same as everyone else. So that’s a huge problem.

Number two, the average experience level of a salesperson is actually less than what it used to be. Back in 2010, when we were hiring salespeople they came, in general, with 5, 7, 8 years experience. Now when we hire salespeople, they come with 1 year of experience. So we’re asking these younger, less experienced salespeople to call on grownups, whose job they’ve never done, and tell them about the future of whatever in a sea of similar sounding solutions. That is a big challenging recipe. So that’s one of the big reasons why sales is so tough. The other piece on the leadership side is that… Well, first of all, leaders don’t often get sales training. Oftentimes leaders are in positions of leadership because they were really great sales reps, and what they quickly realize is what got them there won’t get them to be the kind of leader their team would fight to work with again. You can’t just come in and play super rep as a leader and expect that your team’s going to fall in line. So that’s a huge shift, just in terms of what got you here, what gets you there. There’s not as much training. But also, the expectations of reps these days are different than what they used to be. Imagine you’re back in the day in the 2000s, you’re like a grizzled sales rep. What you need and what you want, what you need out of your manager, the kind of relationship you’re expecting, is far different than what exists today. So there’s a lot of things that change all the time, a lot of variables from the research signed days in sales and sales leadership, and they continue every year and present more challenges.

Building Trust and Relationships is Key to Effective Leadership.

Jeff Tomlin: I appreciate the perspective. It’s sort of funny, it made me laugh because I was chatting with this sales author just the other day about the way people sell, and one of the things that he was arguing was there’s principles in selling, and the things that worked a long time ago, they worked today. Nothing’s really changed. Then I talked to you and, no, actually there’s a lot of things that have changed. If you don’t think about those, you’re going to run into challenges and wonder why doing things the same way five years ago might not be working for your organization now. I can totally relate, you have younger sellers in, you have more complexity in the landscape that they’re selling into and the technology that they’re selling. Makes a lot of sense. By the way, you touched on the guy coming up, he was in a management role, he was a top seller. I was just thinking about the structure of sales teams. One of the things that’s really important is building culture inside the teams. A good culture has an air of trust in it, and the supportiveness, and accountability in the systems. How do you think about building that and reinforcing it when there’s all sorts of different dynamics in any type of sales organization?

David Priemer: Yeah, it’s interesting. When it comes to sales training and leadership training, I’ve been doing this for many years, so it would be very easy for me to say, “Well, here’s what I did. Here’s what you should do,” but that’s actually how we get into trouble. That’s why people hate salespeople and sales leaders, is because we’re just used to doing the same thing year over year. So whatever I say, I always want to go back to the research and data, “Well, what does the research and data say?” When you think about trust, and I talk about this in my latest book, The Sales Leader They Need, there are a few elements as a sales leader that underpin those feelings of trust. So they talk about, for example, the quality of the relationships I have with my reps, my judgment. Am I good at making judgment? Do I do what I say I’m going to do, and so on? They’ve done studies to determine which of these things are the most important. If you want to be the kind of sales leader that your team would fight to work with again, that gains that trust, which of these elements is the most important? And the number one element out of all of them is the quality of the relationship. One of the reasons why the quality of the relationship is so important is because in sales, as in leadership, one of my jobs is to get you to change your behaviour. As a leader, I’m always trying to get you to change your behaviour, sell it like this, forecast this way, present like this. And whenever I ask someone to change their behaviour, of course one of the first questions is, “Well, why the hell should I even do that?” But secondly, if I start to make suggestions and coach, if I have a good relationship with you, you are more likely to take my coaching and advice in a positive light. If we have a bad relationship or a strained relationship, you’re not really going to want to listen to anything I say. So that’s why the quality of that relationship is really important. What’s interesting, without getting too fancy, one of the questions I ask sales leaders is, “Can you picture, Jeff, the best sales leader you ever worked for? Can you picture this person?”

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah.

David Priemer: So people can usually picture this person very fast. And then I ask these leaders, like if it was Jeff, “What was it about Jeff that made Jeff the best you ever worked for?” I do this as an exercise, where I go to the whiteboard and I start writing down what people say. I’ve done this exercise hundreds of times, so I know what the answer is. This is actually what I talk about in the book. So they’ll say things like, “Oh, they pushed me, they challenged me, they coached me, they were transparent, they were honest,” all of these things. And when I look at all of those things, they fall into two buckets. The leader cared about me, and they helped me grow. That’s it. So I tell leaders, if you want to be the best that your team ever had… By the way, when I say, “How did you show up for this best sales leader you ever had?,” people are like, “Oh my gosh, I would run through a brick wall for Jeff. I tried so hard ’cause I didn’t want to disappoint him.” And I say, “Great, you already know what you need to do, care about them, help them grow.” What are the specific skills that feed into those? That’s what I go into in the book and in my practice. You asked me, “What’s the difference?” It’s the quality of the relationships I have with my team. Do I care about them? Am I helping them grow? That’s where that focus needs to be. I can no longer flex my sales skills ’cause, I’ll tell you, one of the things that never comes up in that list is, “Jeff taught me everything he knew about sales. He was the best sales person and he taught me everything.” That never comes up. Even though that may be true-

Jeff Tomlin: Interesting.

David Priemer: That’s not what made Jeff the best.

Effective Coaching Requires Diagnosing Issues and Focusing on Growth.

Jeff Tomlin: Very interesting. So again, I love to think about mental models and ways to simplify topics. And that’s a great way of thinking about, “Hey, what makes a great sales leader?” Had a good relationship with and helped you grow. “They cared about me,” and they helped you grow. What a great way of thinking about it. So on the help you grow side of things, that’s so important. You have to be a good coach, you have to teach functional skills, and you also have to help people work through challenges that they’re having, people have ups and downs, and a lot of things. So tell me a little bit more about the role of coaching and what makes a great coach, and helping people grow through their profession. Actually, I’d love to hear if you have any specific techniques that particularly stand out that make great coaches, or if you want to talk about that.

David Priemer: For sure. Well, it’s funny, this is a big topic, as you can appreciate, when I wrote Sell The Way You Buy, which is my first book, the chapter on discovery was the biggest. It was actually twice as big as any other chapter. I remember I went to my publisher and I said, “I got this big monster chapter here. I don’t know what you want me to do. It’s twice as big as everything else. What should I do with it?” And they said, “Well, is discovery the most important part of the sales process?” I said, “It is.”

Jeff Tomlin: Yes.

David Priemer: And they said, “Well, then it deserves to be twice as big.” Fast-forward four years later, I’m writing The Sales Leader They Need, and the chapter on coaching is this big monster chapter. It’s bigger than everything else. And the publisher again says, “Well, is coaching the most important thing?” I’m like, “It is.”

Jeff Tomlin: It is.

David Priemer: And not just because I say it is, the data says it is. It’s the number one thing that we can do to improve the performance of our team, and yet it’s also one of the most misunderstood. It’s also one of the ones that we think as leaders we’re actually doing, but our team members don’t think we’re doing. It’s also one of the ones that when we do wrong… There was a great study that came out from Bain that looked at sales reps and leaders across the US and the UK. They interviewed sales reps and they said, “Would you pay $1 for an hour of your manager’s time?” And they found that, I think it was only 46% of reps were willing to pay a dollar for an hour of their manager’s time. Meaning when we get together when we coach, as reps, we actually don’t find it all that helpful. So it’s really important, when you think about top-tier coaching, and there’s a lot I talk about in the book, number one would be to have a system to diagnose issues. So think about, as the coach, I’m watching my team play on the court, and my job is to help them be better. Well, I can’t help them be better if I don’t know what they need to get better at. In sales, we are often challenged as leaders to figure out, “Okay, Jeff is struggling to close stuff. Why? I don’t know. Shoot, I got to figure this out.” And if I don’t have a system to diagnose those issues, it’s going to be very difficult for me to coach Jeff, and I might end up coaching him on the wrong thing. I can go deeper if you want, on what are these systems? But having the system to diagnose issues, and making sure that you are focusing on those things in your coaching conversations to drive that growth is the most important.

Use Leading Indicators to Diagnose and Improve Sales Performance.

Jeff Tomlin: Just touch on the systems, just give us a flavour.

David Priemer: Yeah, so actually, I talk about two different systems. One is the top-down, bottom-up. So the top-down system would be very simply, if you are a patient of mine in my medical practice and you came into me with a sore elbow, I’d send you for an ultrasound, or an X-ray, or blood work, or whatever. Then I would look at what the radiologist said, what the blood work came back and said, and I would say, “Okay, it looks like to me you have a fracture, or you have a sprain, or something,” top-down. So the way I kind of think about it, I call this the leading indicators coaching formulas, to say, if you break down your sales process in terms of like… Okay, let’s say you have activities which lead to pipeline, which leads to close business, which then lead to potential upsell opportunities. That would be a simplified view of your sales pipeline. If I actually assign numbers to those stages, and I can go more granular if you want, I would often see a drop-off. So for example, when I was at Salesforce, I noticed that I had a large number of reps that had a lot of activity, tons of calls, tons of emails, especially my reps in New York City, tons of hustle, and then there’d be no pipeline. I’d be like, “Okay, well then there’s something going on here. I don’t need to talk about closing business. I don’t need to talk about upsells and renewals. You obviously have a fracture at this point in your process, let’s drill down.” By the way, I say that’s an example of a leading indicators formula for a rep, but maybe you have a business development rep who’s not responsible for closing deals, but rather there’s calls, there’s connects, there’s callbacks, there’s opportunity flips. You have an SE, a solution engineer who’s focused on demos to… You can have this. There’s a leading indicator formula for success, find what that is for your organization, model it out, get the data from your CRM, and it’s like putting your reps through an X-ray machine to find out where you need to focus on.

Be Authentic and Share Positive News to Boost Morale.

Jeff Tomlin: Love it, focus on the inputs. I wanted to talk about morale on the sales floor. There’s all sorts of dynamics going on on the sales floor at any time. There’s changes inside of the sales team, there’s changes inside of a sales organization, there’s up months, there’s down months. One of the most important things for any sales floor is the energy. It’s got to have energy, and it’s got to be humming, and people have got to feed off that. They tend to always be the best when there’s this flow. So how do you think about managing the morale, and keeping that energy positive when there’s changes that go on where you lose team members, you’ve got to add team members, there’s all sorts of different dynamics that impact the positivity running through the team?

David Priemer: That’s a big question. I’ll tell you one of the things that you don’t want to have, and I learned this the hard way, is inauthentic positivity. So to give you an example, that company that I told you right off the bat, we grew to $100 million and we got acquired. Well, the company that acquired us wasn’t our cup of tea as far as the parent organization we wanted to live in. We got acquired, there was a bunch of turbulence, they fired a bunch of people, there was a bit of a culture clash. I managed a team of 21 people, half of whom were older than I was, half were younger, and I thought it was my job to keep morale high and to keep everyone together. So I was trying to be positive like, “Hey everyone, I know there’s some turbulence, but I think there’s going to be a lot of good opportunities here,” and so on. A little while into the narrative, a friend of mine, who was the director of marketing, came to me, and she was friends with some of the folks on my team, and she said, “David, your team doesn’t think you’re being honest with them. They think that you see the turbulence that’s going on and you’re trying to put on a brave face, but they don’t think you’re being honest with them, and you’re losing their trust,” and she was 100% right. People started to leave, not just because of morale, but just stuff they were seeing. I think one of the important things is, as a leader, you always want to present the positive, but also your team wants to know what you think. You’re a person, and they can smell if you’re being inauthentic. So I say, you don’t have to overshare, but be honest about how you’re feeling. That’s number one. Number two, I think we’re challenged now, especially in these hybrid work environments. I won’t necessarily weigh in on the return to office or not, but now that people are working remotely, and there’s this hybrid work, that’s also been one of the changes that’s happened in the last little while. For whatever reason, good news is harder to propagate, bad news always travels fast regardless. So leaders have to put a little bit of an extra effort in to not just propagating good news. But imagine you’re a sales rep, you joined a company, and I’m sitting here alone in my basement, not hearing other people on the phone. There’s no buzz, there’s no momentum. Leaders either have to call their people back into the office, or they need to try extra hard to promote all of the good things and learning that are happening. So leaders in that sense have to be a conduit of this great knowledge, and sharing, and so on. So as a leader, it’s really important for me to bring my team together to share the positive news, to propagate these winning behaviours not happening as organically as it used to. So these are just a couple of things. As we think about morale, don’t paint things to be… It’s tough times out there. If you just kind of happy wash everything, people won’t believe you and you’ll lose their trust. But it’s also important to propagate the winning behaviours and good things that are happening, ’cause they are happening. It’s very easy to often focus on the negative. So as a leader, we need to be one of those conduits of positivity as well.

Authenticity and Relationships will Shape Future Sales Leadership Success.

Jeff Tomlin: Solid advice. I’m picking up what you’re laying down. How about the future of sales leadership? Any particular trends or technology that you’re seeing that is going to change the game in the future years ahead?

David Priemer: It’s funny, as it relates to technology, ’cause we have so much more. We have 48% year-over-year marketing technology growth. But what’s interesting, people ask me all the time, “Will AI change things? Will AI help me coach better, or produce better insights from which to coach and help my team get better?” Yeah. But despite all the technology we have available to us, if you were to answer the question, “Are we better at sales than we were 10 years ago?,” the answer is no. The data would not agree with you that we’re better at sales, and I could also argue that we’re not as good at leadership. I talk about this in The Sales Leader They need, the average tenure of a VP of sales continues to decrease, and now sits at like a year and a few months. So in an environment where there’s now all of this pressure to perform, there’s so many different solutions competing, you have AI that we think is actually making us better at sales, which isn’t necessarily. The thing I come back to is that relationship, especially now. The younger salespeople, what they crave, they crave a lot more authenticity. They crave a lot more meaning in their job. They have a lot more will to have balance in their lives. I’m old school, I’m 49 years old. I come from the school where you work really hard, you make the calls, you put in the effort, you try not to complain. It takes many years to achieve a certain level of mastery. And I tell my kids all the time, “The world rewards people who do the hard things,” but the newer generations will think a little bit differently. So it’s important, if you want to be successful as a leader in the future, you actually have to bring that authenticity. You actually have to care about your people as human beings, and their needs, and help them grow. Like I said right off the top, that was important 10 years ago. It is even more important now in the face of all of this adversity, the changing work environment, the number of solutions in the market, and the demographic that’s entering the workforce. I think the statistic was… Back in the day 15 years ago, we were talking about millennials entering the workforce, and how they were going to take over. The younger the workforce gets, the more differently they think about things. And I think if we want to get the most out of them, we need to treat them differently than we were treating salespeople 10, 20 years ago.

David Priemer Shares Insights, Resources, and Contact Information

Jeff Tomlin: David, I’m a very data-driven person, so I appreciate other data-driven people, and people that can tell me, “Hey, this is the way to do something, because that’s what the data says.” So I love it. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, and I appreciate all of your insights. If people wanted to continue the conversation with you, how do they reach out to you?

David Priemer: I’m a friendly person on LinkedIn. You have my name in the show notes here, you can always reach out and say, “Hey, I heard you talking with Jeff,” say hi. I give away tons of content on my website, cerebralselling.com. I give away too much, but it’s ungated. Go have a blast. If you feel like checking out the books, they’re all available on Amazon. You can look up my name, or the books are Sell The Way You Buy, and The Sales Leader They Need. Yeah, it’s all there for you.

Jeff Tomlin: David, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I bid you a fantastic day, and amazing week, and a great rest of your summer out in Toronto, Ontario Canada. Hope you come back and join us again on the podcast sometime in the future.

David Priemer: Yeah. Anytime, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: There you have it from a sales scientist! 

Leadership is Key to Sales Success and that’s the first takeaway. Effective sales leadership is crucial for navigating today’s complex sales environment. Building strong relationships with your team, focusing on their growth, and providing honest feedback are all essential for driving performance and retention.

The second takeaway that I have here is about Data-Driven Approaches and Human Connection: While data and technology are important tools, they should complement, not replace, human interaction. Salespeople need to combine data analysis with authentic relationships to succeed. The future of sales lies in blending technology with genuine human connection.

If you’ve enjoyed David’s episode Redefining Sales Leadership and Performance in a Complex Market, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 721: Human Touch in Digital Age: Optimizing Customer Interactions with Alex Levin or Episode 711: The Value Sale: How to Simplify Your Message and Close More Deals with Ian Campbell

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!