Ideas in the Wild: How Stephen Timme and Melody Astley Are Preparing Sales Professionals for Success

Sales professionals have a vital mission: to generate revenue for their company and ensure its continued success. But in today’s selling landscape, buyers are more educated than ever. Salespeople need a way to cut through the noise and navigate new complexities.

In Insight-Led Selling, Stephen Timme and Melody Astley introduce us to a sales method that stands the test of time. Readers will hear from top executives from companies like AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Georgia Pacific as they share their expectations of the sales professionals vying for their business. I recently caught up with both Stephen and Melody to learn about what inspired them to write the book and their favorite ideas they share with readers.

What happened that made you decide to write the book? What was the exact moment when you realized these ideas needed to get out there?

Stephen: Sellers from some of the top technology companies we work with have for years asked if we had a book that could help them more relevant to executive buyers. This made me think we really have something to say! Melody and I for at least 5 years had talked about writing a book. In early 2020 I said to Melody, let’s write this damn book or never talk about it again. So, we wrote the book.

Melody: We’ve been threatening to write a book for years because we’ve developed so much content that sellers find useful. It got to the point where we said let’s write it or never talk about it again. The COVID hit and everything got turned upside down. We found ourselves working from home and so we carved out the time to write it. And so we did – it’s our COVID project!

What’s your favorite specific, actionable idea in the book?

Stephen: Being a finance type my favorite part is developing financial insights for a seller’s customer. What I really like is how we don’t make it all about the numbers but how executives from all parts of a company like sales, marketing, operations, and product development use finance to communicate in a common language. And that sellers should use the language of finance to communicate the value of their solutions since finance is the language of business. BTW, our company’s name FinListics is a combination of Finance and Linguistics.

Melody: My favorite idea is to tell the executive something they don’t know. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but in Insight-Led Selling, we provide a framework for how to uncover these new insights, and how to talk about them in an effective way. Sellers who build these insights into their practice never run out of new points of view to share with their customers and prospects.

What’s a story of how you’ve applied this idea in your own life? What has it done for you?

Stephen: I have had the privilege of working with a number of Fortune 500 companies and all kinds of different groups within those companies. I learned long ago that if you are talking with folks, especially those who aren’t finance types, and start spewing out a bunch of numbers it’s snooze time for those whom you are talking with. It’s much more effective to talk about the area of financial performance like growing revenue and relate it to how groups and individuals help manage that. That’s why we help sellers articulate how their solutions help their customers better manage financial performance.

Melody: Heck, before I joined FinListics, I used these insights successfully as a seller with the client I was serving at the time, and I saw how it deepened the whole conversation and elevated our relationship. It changed the way I think about how to approach customers and prospects, and gave me an appreciation for what it means to truly put the customer first. And they saw it, too.