Dealstorming with Former Yahoo! Chief Solutions Officer, Tim Sanders

Dealstorming with Former Yahoo! Chief Solutions Officer, Tim Sanders

My guest this week is Tim Sanders. He’s the former chief solutions officer at Yahoo! and a New York Times bestselling author. He’s also a cofounder of the research consultancy Deeper Media, Inc. and a top-rated speaker. He joined me on my podcast this week to talk about his new book, Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon that Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges.

As Tim defines it, “Dealstorming is the idea bringing together collective brainpower — not just inside sales, but across a company — to solve a really tough sales challenge. Think of it like the combination of brainstorming and dealmaking.

“Brainstorming is a very creative process. Dealmaking is a very linear process. And what I’ve learned over the last 15 years developing dealstorming, is that we can solve a lot of the problems that we’ve experienced with brainstorming. But, more importantly, we can bring innovation to the sales process. [And we need to] because more than ever, [sales is] complex, it’s difficult, and we’ve got to be more creative about how we sell.”

As always, when I have guests on the show like this, the conversation is going to be richer and more interesting than the sparse notes I’ll capture in writing on this page. So, I’d encourage you to click the play button above and listen to our whole conversation.

In particular, Tim shared a great example of the origins of dealstorming used in the development of the Pixar film, Toy Story. That story starts at 2:34 mark in our conversation.

Tim described how Pixar president and cofounder Ed Catmull told him about the seemingly insurmountable problems making the movie. Ed told Tim that the whole idea of Toy Story was “troublesome.” He said, “This would be the first ever animated movie made inside a computer.” It turned out they needed 700 independent facial controllers for each character and a decade of rendering time.

Then, the day after Thanksgiving, a year into the production, their distribution partner, Disney, shut the entire production down, saying “the script was unworkable” and “the lead character, Woody, was unlikable.” The creative process they used to overcome those and dozens of other problems lead to the dealstorming process Tim now teaches.

At 13:11 Tim describes the 7 Steps to Dealstorming (Qualify, Organize, Prepare, Convene, Execute, Analyze, Report).

At 15:10 he explained the 3 personas you need to run a great meeting, which are the Hacker, Chef, and Artist.

You can learn more about Tim at his website www.timsanders.com.

Special Offer: As a thank you and reward to my listeners, I’m giving away three free copies of the Audible edition of my book, Sell with a Story: How to Capture Attention, Build Trust, and Close the Sale. So, that’s the downloadable audio version that you would listen to on your phone or in the car.

If you’d like to win one of those, send me your favorite sales story to paul@leadwithastory.com. The best three stories win. And if they’re good enough, and you’re interested, I might even feature them in an upcoming podcast or book. I’ll leave the contest open for 2 weeks after this podcast first posts.

PAS square profile Paul Smith is one of the world’s leading experts on business storytelling. He’s a keynote speaker, storytelling coach, and bestselling author of the books Lead with a StoryParenting with a Story, and Sell with a Story.

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