The sales machine is constantly changing, which means that sales professionals need to be constantly learning to keep up with the changing environment, especially at the top of the funnel. Today’s guest is an authority on sales training with some interesting insights on the education side of selling.
David Priemer is the Founder and Chief Sales Scientist of the sales training company Cerebral Selling. Listen to the episode to hear what David has to say about what he calls the “sea of sameness” and how sales professionals can differentiate themselves in that sea.
Episode Highlights:
- The state of selling on the education side of things, and the difficulty of differentiating useful information when so much information is available
- David’s advice for people who are looking for useful ways to differentiate information
- How to demonstrate overt benefit
- How the exclusionary principle can be applied at the top of the funnel
- The importance of understanding human behavior in sales
- Why messaging and delivery mechanism are two of the most important things for sales professionals to understand
- How to mobilize authentic voices in the sales cycle
- How to showcase value in a delivery mechanism
- The importance of engaging customers in your messaging synthesis
Resources:
Transcript:
Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week I have a guest who I actually found David on the internet, he wrote an article. John Barrows, who’s a colleague of mine, stuck it up on LinkedIn, that’s how I got to know David Priemer. He is the founder of Cerebral Selling out of Canada. He is an amazing person, I don’t say that just because he’s an engineer like I am but when I read his article, I realized, “Wow, there’s someone out there who really has thought about this whole state of selling, where we are.”
I asked him to come on the show today. He has a ton of topics he could talk about because he specializes in the entire pipeline but we really wanna focus today on the education pieces of top of funnel. He’s gonna share with us his views on where things are going and how we can really better our knowledge, our profession, and get away from this sea of sameness as he calls it. David, welcome to the podcast.
David: Thanks so much, Marylou. It’s great to be here. It was a great intro, wow.
Marylou: Well, you’re a great guy.
David: My goodness, thank you so much.
Marylou: We chatted offline about the topic, you’re spot on. We really wanna talk about where we are with the current state of selling, the education pieces. I have this conversation with my kids all the time because one of them asked, “Why do we need to go to college, mom, when everything is out there for us to learn?” Yes, everything is out there to learn but the problem is there’s so much information there that people are really getting way overwhelmed at what’s there.
Can you share with us your views on what the state of selling is in terms of the education side of things? Point us in a direction of where we should be looking so that we can get out of this sea of sameness.
David: There’s a lot of nuance to the current state of sales. Part of the challenge in a way is we’re so plugged in, we’re in the sea of information, and yet we are also stuck in the sea of sameness. As we plug in, very little out there becomes differentiated to us anymore. It used to be there were only a few vendors in every age or functional area and now there are literally thousands that are, let’s say to some extent, differentiate from one another but everyone says the same thing.
If I were to go and give a talk and say, “Here’s a bunch of value propositions, we reduce cycle times, we improve efficiency, we conversion rates, we improve customer satisfaction, and we reduce churn.” How many of our vendors does that cover? The answer would be most, right? We all tend to say the same thing and yet tension spans are very, very short.
The game has changed, now we have to device different tactics. What tends to happen is that companies tend to come back with, “The stuff that I was doing before to be successful isn’t working.” They’re looking for that new approach. That’s one of the biggest things that changed on the environment side. You asked about why the education front, I know it’s a big focus for you.
Marylou: Big, big focus. What you mentioned upfront about the value prop, I have been spending the last month trying to figure out almost like a puzzle, putting together a game of how to create a value prop that’s differentiated. It’s really hard to find a set of tools and get the students in a mindset so that they know which variables to pull from the plethora of marketing collateral that’s out there in their company or competitor landscapes or website research to be able to pull in areas where they think they can be distinctive and unique and different. What advice do you have for people who are swimming in that sea? What’s step one of trying to figure out where they should look for differentiation?
David: I do a lot of reading, as I’m sure you do, one of my favorite books is Dan Pink’s book To Sell Is Human. In that book, he talks about a concept called clarity, which I found exists in all of these well-differentiated areas of sales and marketing. Clarity is all about helping your target customer understand what it is that you do in the value that you can add very quickly. Often times, in our typical pitches, we start talking about how we’ve added more RAM and more ROM and we’re made of aluminum and these kinds of things. We just sound the same as everyone else.
Where I like to start with is that point of clarity, what is the specific problem you solve? If you were to meet someone at a party and they were to say, “Marylou, what is it that you do?” We’re asking that question half not caring what the other person has to say. Get really good at answering that question. Dan Pink is a real master at this, Simon Sinek has a ton of content on this. I try as much as I can to stand on the shoulder of these giants and post some content to my site as well about how to really get to the core of the problem that you solve, there are lots of ways.
There’s starting with the core value proposition, the business tangible value that you add because that’s what really people care about, they don’t care about how you do it as much. They care about, later on, how, they start with the why and they start with what’s the value. Starting with that point of clarity can really, really help cut through the noise for people.
Marylou: The other thing that I remember reading somewhere, like you, I read a lot, I read something about a research project where they were looking to find what item separated one vendor from another. The number one thing they came up with was something called overt benefit which is what’s in it for the customer or the client and it’s not feature based, you have to find this direct path of the overwhelming benefit that you provide that no one else has articulated or articulated in a way that the client of the customer can differentiate you in his head.
They always give us consumer examples. When they talk about minty fresh toothpaste versus whitening toothpaste, there’s an adjective that seems to describe the differences. Have you found that there are building blocks where people can start looking like over benefit being one? Are there other things that they can look at to be able to start to synthesize what these blocks are for differentiation?
David: Absolutely. One of my most favorite, I should say maybe even guilty pleasures, is the infomercials. I love infomercials, not that I buy a lot of stuff of infomercials but I love the pitch, I love watching the shopping channel, I love to hear how people string together these pitches. One of the things that these programs do in order to differentiate themselves in a very early stage in their conversation with the buyer is they cut them, I can pull that through for a second.
The idea is if you’re gonna sell someone a band aid, there are three ways to sell a band aid. You can look for people who have cuts and sell them a band aid, you can look for people who are afraid of getting cuts and sell them a band aid, or you can cut people and you can sell them a band aid. I’m not suggesting we go out and intentionally harm anyone, but the idea is you’re watching these infomercials.
Let’s say for example there’s one for those knives that can cut through shoe leather. How do they start off? You know what I’m talking about? You know how those infomercials start off? How do they start off?
Marylou: I don’t remember, I’m not a TV watcher. I think the last infomercial I watched is probably in the 80s.
David: These infomercials are timeless. I’m gonna show you this sharp set of knives, I can cut through anything. In the start there’s some black and white grainy footage of someone trying to cut a tomato with a horrible knife that’s dull, the tomato splatters all over everything, that’s an example. You may be watching that show not even thinking to yourself, “I need a really sharp set of knives.” All of a sudden you’re watching this and they’ve done a great job of creating some pain, they have cut you that you’re thinking, “Yes, that is me. My goodness.” Tell me what is your solution, knife Gods?
I’m not, again, suggesting to go and intentionally cut anyone. But often times, in our business and in our personal lives, we walk around with this layer of protection around us. We need that layer of protection and insolation, otherwise all the messages of the world would inundate us and we’ll be completely overwhelmed.
Every now and then, if you can go out with a message that is piercing that talks about a specific pain that resonates with people, you cut them a little bit first, then you’re gonna be in great shape. I’ll give you a very, very simple example. For many years, Yesware, they do email tracking, have this logo on their website, I don’t know if they have it anymore.
The thing on their website said, “Do you wanna know what happens after you click send?” That’s a good example of cutting someone like, “Oh my gosh. You know what, I haven’t thought about what happens after I click send. I do wanna know but I don’t. Yes, we’re Gods, tell me. What is it that you can help me with?” I love this idea of “cutting people.”
Marylou: When I’m teaching clients and students how to write emails, we’re looking for what I call triggers. What you just mentioned was a curiosity trigger because you’re like, “I’m curious, I’ve never thought about it. I wonder what the result is.” This whole thing about contrasting, before and after, old world to new world, those are the elements, I think, from an emotional standpoint that we need to grab attention from people at top of funnel, especially, in order to get them to at least stop what they’re doing and notice us. That’s an art in itself.
There are certain triggers that work with certain audiences. The other thing that I had to really learn in a hard way is that our ideas don’t have to really hit the entire market, we need to segment down to a size of accounts and industries where these messages would resonate more. Once we built that momentum, then we can use social proof of others who have come before our prospects who have been successful by using our product or service to get the results they want.
It has to start somewhere where, like you said, you’re really looking to give them an idea that they hadn’t thought of before or twisted in some fashion so it takes on a new life of its own. Boy, having put that pressure on sales people to come up with what those things are is really tough.
David: There are definitely, I’d say, layers of degree, if I’m gonna use an Olympic diving term like degrees of difficulty. I’m putting together those kinds of pitches. Sometimes coming up with a really good pain laced introductory statement can be challenging. But I think what you just mentioned, this idea of the exclusionary principle, is actually quite powerful. It’s something that not only do I teach but I have used a lot in my own personal experience as a sales leader.
Imagine people think about having on their website, “It’s an accounting package for people who don’t know anything about accounting.” There’s been an exclusionary principle there but also in your sales collateral. We used to have a bunch of our companies, and I’ve done four startups, we used to have slides in our collateral that used to say, “This isn’t for everybody.” People would lean in like, “You’re in sales, what do you mean you’re not for everybody?”
That exclusionary principle, it’s amazing because it helps customers self-select. It also puts you as a seller in what I call the ultimate mindset to do discovery which is eliminative, it’s that of a healthy skeptic which helps you eliminate the content of bias that we have. It’s like if I’m going out on a dream date with Marylou and I’m thinking to myself, “She could be the one, Marylou could be the one.” I get all excited.
When I’m on my date with Marylou, I start looking for evidence that she’s the one rather than going and saying, “I hope this date goes really well. She’s probably not the one but I’m gonna keep an open mind.” The two are very different. That’s actually very easy when you think about top of the funnel, what can you do? Think about the two points, think about who you’re for, the exclusionary. This isn’t for everyone.
Marylou: One of my most successful emails of late, I borrowed from a gentleman at UK, Phil M Jones is name. He wrote a book about what to say, Exactly What To Say, I think it is. He had a phrase in there that said, “I’m not sure if it’s for you, but…” I tried that in some of our cold emails and it’s that exclusionary thing. I don’t think it’s for you but if it is, or but, there may be a way that we can help you solve a problem.
It got a lot of interest because people are naturally wanting to be included in the group. They need to know what’s not for them, what is it that we think is not for them.
David: There’s a nuance to what you said as well, it’s partially being exclusionary but then partially, saying, “I don’t know yet, you might be a good fit. I don’t know, we need to have a conversation first.” You’re intriguing them with the possibility of them being a good fit. Now they’re willing to spend the time.
Marylou: And then asking their permission, when will be a good time for you to take a proper look at this? All those little things like that is twisting those words and understanding human behavior. I think it’s all coming down to, David, is that sales people today have really got to not only know their products and features inside and out. If you get shook at three in the morning, you could tell all the benefits of potential feature and the results that people are gonna get.
That has to be engrained in your DNA. Also, now, we’re really seeing that differentiation is really a good understanding, a working understanding of human behavior.
David: It’s never been more important. Dan Pink, not to, again, stand in the shoulders of giants, this is part of my ego for starting Cerebral Selling, is that sales has become, if it wasn’t before, a thinking person’s profession. It’s really drilling down which is why I think we have two engineers here on the phone talking about this but it’s really about understanding the why, why do people buy things? How do they respond? Why do they hate sales people so much? There’s all these nuance. We have to be always curious about why people do things and teach it, which we don’t do as often as we should.
Marylou: Getting back to the teaching thing, where do we start with this? It just seems like it’s so overwhelming as even we’re talking. Where do we start as teachers, where do we start as students if we wanna really begin the understanding? It’s really awareness, awareness of what areas of behavior—I’m focusing on top of funnel—should we really start understanding as sales professional? How do we apply that to our sales conversation canvas based on the role of the person we’re trying to sell to?
Another thing I teach is we have multiple people that we meet at relative positions in the pipeline. Some let us in the door, some are the actual decision maker, some are going to be influencing the decision maker. Our talk tracks to each of those are different, our language is different, and presumably, the behavior of each of those is different.
As an instructor like you are with Cerebral Selling, if I came to you and said, “I’m throwing in the towel, I realized I’ve gotta get this behavior understood so I could use it to my advantage.” Where do we being, David?
David: For me, there are two things that I would prescribe as the doctor here. Number one is a crash course on messaging or making sure that your message is crisp and targeted, and you can articulate in the right way. There’s a lot of nuance, I get that. But messaging is really, really important so you don’t get stuck in the sea of sameness.
The other thing, which is just as important, is the delivery mechanism. You could have the best email in the world, the best outreach in the world, the best message, but if no one cares to hear it and you’re not able to get that message heard and through, then it’s gonna be useless. The question is how do you get that message across? Often times, I’m sending these amazing emails and the emails have all of this value and they have all of these great buzz words and there’s this, there’s that. But often times, we don’t read emails.
Thinking about creative things, it’s funny, handwritten notes are making a comeback, video is huge now in terms of open rates, just wacky things. I’ve seen tons of these wacky ABM campaigns where people will send everything from little mini barbeques to little teenie tiny piñatas. There are all sorts of tactics that we can use that are different, that we can use as a vehicle to get our message across.
I think one of the reasons why video has been so successful is because people like to be entertained, we all find ourselves sitting on our phones doing nothing in the time that we should actually be working like looking through our Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube or what have you. That could as easily be watching a vendor deliver their pitch.
I probably wouldn’t open a whole bunch of emails, a whole bunch of pitches but man, I’d open an email from Marylou with a video in it and see her falling her face for 90 seconds and see what that’s like. But the whole thing is I would focus on two things, which is what I do and teach, is the messaging and number two is the delivery mechanism.
It’s not just the delivery mechanism trying to make it engaging, but also piggy backing on some very well understood psychological principles like reciprocity, adding value first before making an ask. Those are the things that I think a lot about.
Marylou: I think especially now that we have automated follow up tools, sequencing, whatever you wanna call it, we’re able to line up what I call lego blocks and messages from message one through message eight and create a talk track or a playlist from that that allows us to have a conversation with the prospect. What we’re seeing now, what you validated, is the use of video does increase the response rate, postcards inserted into the stream where you stop the sequence, mail the postcard, and maybe follow up on the postcard or like you said a thank you card where there is a soft close.
There’s not really a call to action on that, you’re just being grateful. All those things help to mix it up and keep the prospect engaged and entertained, in some cases. But I think the responsibility that this is putting on the sales rep now to come up with what these things are, and also, if you’re in an organization where your sequences are dictated to you and you’re just trying to follow up on the order in which someone else is set for you makes it a little bit difficult.
David: There’s definitely a lot of room for improvisation and for reps to do the things that work for them. Every rep is different, for some reps getting on a video and doing some of these things are very second nature, others not so much. It also depends to your point of view or who you’re selling into, not just the role but sometimes even the geography.
I used to manage teams in New York, in Toronto, in Atlanta, with customers all along the East Coast. The way that we interacted with each of those customers was very different, the tactics could be different. The one thing I actually do advocate for is this idea of never falling in love with your tactics, this idea that you try this thing, it works, we’re just gonna keep spanning the crap out of that tactic until it stops working, that’s not the way to go.
I’ll tell you a story, I was at a conference in London in the fall. A fellow was telling me a story about how one of his reps tried to get a deal closed at the end of the month by facetiming the customer while they were on vacation. You might have a visceral reaction, it sounds like you do to that particular tactic. I don’t know what the relationship was between the client and the seller in this case, if that made sense. I do know that once you can get on a texting relationship with a client, that’s fantastic, people pay attention. Text is a lot better, but the Facetime on vacation…
On one hand, I have this usually negative visceral reaction to what would I like? Will I like the seller to be pinging me? On the other hand, I applaud the seller for trying something different, whether you think it’s overly aggressive or not. Maybe they did have a great relation, maybe it was completely appropriate. But this idea that we always have to be trying new things because as soon as we follow up with something, it’s gonna stop working. That’s the challenge we all find ourselves in.
Marylou: I came up in the direct mail era, we had telephone, we had direct mail, period, that were most of the ways, and face to face, belly to belly as I called it. Direct mail worked really well and then it didn’t, now all of a sudden direct mail is coming back. Another thing to add on to what you’re saying, David, is that it may not work today but bring it back in a couple years because it may work again.
People get used to following the wagon and doing the bell curve, everybody jumps on the bell curve and does some video for over a year from now maybe not the way to go. You have to be very agile and nimble in the way that you communicate. Luckily, the tools we have out there give us that ability to move things around and it’ll remember for us what we did 8, 10, 12 months ago and what worked, what didn’t as long as you’re tracking properly.
I think what I would really focus on, of the two things you mentioned, is the messaging piece first so that you’re really understanding what these playlists look like, what these talk track looks like. Also, the other thing that I teach is relative position in the pipeline. If we’re doing targeted outreach, which is what I teach, then we have to worry about five levels of awareness that are prospects.
They may not be aware of who we are, they’re at this unaware state of, “I don’t know you, I don’t have a problem, what is it that you’re trying to talk to me about?” We go from there to problem aware where they know there’s a problem but they don’t necessarily know a solution to the problem, all the way up to level five which is, “I’m very aware, I’m most aware, I know you and I’m willing to start the dialogue with you.”
Our messaging even has to take into account the buyer’s head is in one of those five states. We have to really understand how to language our conversation to not only hit them where they’re at, determine where they’re at, but get them to move to that next level.
David: I have a little technique on my website, it’s actually a video, it’s an article called Target Your Message with this Amazingly Simple Technique which describes exactly what you just said which is, think about your message as concentric rings. As you get closer to the center, you get more to the tangible visceral, here’s the business impact that you can see. Outer rings, it’s more like the how.
It’s not that one is better than the other, you can chain these messages together but depending on who you’re talking to, you might choose one versus the other as a starting point.
Marylou: That’s another thing, is you can’t be enamored with, “Are you gonna help me? Can I talk to you? Can I get 15 minutes of your time?” You have to really go in with I’m not sure where we’re at here so I’m gonna provide you with a lot of helpful information until you tell me and signal me where you’re at. I’m gonna make some assumptions about where you’re at but I’m not gonna overwhelm you with where I think you should be, which is the biggest mistake I’m seeing now in a lot of these sequences.
I’ve been tracking a sequence of late from a vendor, I love the vendor, but their email sequences are horrid. I wrote to the marketing guy, I’m like, “Have you seen your email messages that are coming out?” It’s all about, “Can you help me? Can I get to see you? Can I take 10 minutes of your time?” With no value as to why I should even do that.
David: I’ll give you another tip. We haven’t talked about it yet but it ties in nicely with what you’re mentioning before about what’s old is new again. When we used to book travel, we used to book travel with travel agents and then travel agents went away because the internet happened, “We have all these travel option, what do we need travel agents anymore?”
But what’s happening now is that travel agents are making a comeback because there’s too much choice. You guys have the Trivago guy, you guys have the Trivago guy in the states, it’s a fear-based pitch, “How do you know you’re getting the best rate on the hotel? You can trust us, we’ll aggregate it for you.” The data shows the thing that people trust more than anything else is someone like themselves. The question is how can we mobilize the authentic voice of people like ourselves in the sales cycle?
It’s funny, when I watched my website and I needed a logo, I went to my buddy who had a logo design for his website and I said, “Who did you use?” He told me and I just did that because I don’t have time to look around. Imagine, you’re reaching out to your prospects now and you’re trying to figure out what’s the best wording and what’s the best medium because you’re trying to breakthrough as a stranger.
We try to avoid the cold calls, we wanna do the research and have all the contacts we can but I guarantee, there is someone that that person is willing to listen more than you, aka someone like them, that you could probably mobilize to deliver that message on your behalf. That’s why we’re seeing the rise of these review sites like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and Capterra, and so on.
That’s just one of the ways that we can promote advocacy. All of the data says that because I listened to someone that’s like me, I think companies should focus more and more on mobilizing those authentic voices as a tactic. You don’t see as much as you would expect to see these days and keeping how effective it is.
Marylou: Referral systems are one of the areas that I look in first to see if the client has a good customer base with a high, what we call NPS score, Net Promoter Score. There’s a loyal client base in there activating a referral system that works on the loyal promoter. For example, if they were to move jobs from company A to company B, then trigger those alerts that they move because they are the best people to say, “Now that you’re over at XYZ Company and you remember how great the job we did for you at ABC Company, let’s have a conversation when you’re settled in about what it is that they’re doing there and whether they can use our help.” That whole conversation track, it doesn’t exist in so many companies, it’s just mind boggling to me.
David: Here’s a great story, I think it ties a lot of that together. There was a fellow who has a company who had a solution that did exactly what you described which was, “David, wouldn’t you like to know, one of your top customers leaves their company, goes to somewhere else, they can get you planted there, wouldn’t you like to know when that happens?” At first I was thinking, “Doesn’t LinkedIn tell me this? Can’t I figure it out?”
He was saying, “It’s not really proactive in terms of telling you that. You can run reports and all of these kinds of things.” I said, “This sounds interesting but call me back later, I’ve got more important things.” This is the ultimate, he was great, he would periodically get back to me. Instead of saying, “David, is it time yet? Does it makes sense to chat?” He would find examples of my customers that have moved from company to company, he would bring them to me as gifts, “David, I found Marylou. She just left her company and went to this other company, I thought you’d like to know.”
It’s awesome because it’s reciprocity, he’s adding value, he’s showcasing the value of his solution. Back to the idea of advocacy, it’s a play for me, a huge value for me. I love that.
Marylou: That fits in line with your delivery mechanism, it’s not only what you’re delivering, where you’re delivering, but the context around what you’re delivering. I think the two combination to the messaging, also looking at the lead mix, are you referral? Are you outreach specifically? Are you follow up on inbound? What is this conversation track that you’re putting together?
Once you tie all that together, it’s not very difficult, but once you tie it all together, you’ll have a really good system that you can start pushing records through so you’ll have statistically relevant sample of what those conversation tracks did, how they performed, then you can move things around later on. As you said, always be testing. We’re all about get your ego on your pocket, don’t fall in love with your code, make sure that it’s performing, and then try to iterate, make it better with every statistically relevant of data that comes back to you. Sales is kind of the same way.
David: That’s the only way to do it. The way I think about messaging so often is it’s like clothes, you’re getting ready to go out, you’re standing in front of the mirror, you’re all dressed, ready to go, you look at yourself and you say to yourself I look good. I’m ready to go out and I go out to where I’m going, going to the party or going to work. I realize that I’m dressed completely inappropriately for whatever it is I’m going to but I thought it looked good when I was in the mirror.
Often times, that’s the way I feel about our messaging. We do it in the lab environment and it sounds good but either it falls flat or you go out to your existing customers and you say, “Here’s what I believed are the value of our solution was, what value are you seeing?” Often times, they’ll find that there’s a nuance in the value that they see that you don’t see in using those words, the words that your customers use, is very, very powerful, not just the actual words themselves which are powerful themselves but even just articulating the fact that this is the value that our customers get.
Our customers tell us that A, B, and C. When I hired Marylou to train my sales team, here’s the impact that they tell me they see, not that what I thought. Engaging your customers in that messaging synthesis is really, really important.
Marylou: I remember working with an accounting firm one time who insisted that they were back office accountants. That’s how they defined themselves, describe themselves, their behavior, their whole outlook, all their memos, everything talked about, we’re back office accountants. I said, “Let’s do this whole study, let’s have a very short interview with some of your clients. I’ll ask them two questions, first one is how do you describe ABC Accounting Firm?”
Not one person said, “They’re back office accountants.” The overall gist of how they described this firm was, “They are an extension of our team, they are business growth managers, we would be lost without them.” That’s a very different message. We started changing all of our conversation tracks to include the extension of the team, the business manager growth, wow, it made a big difference.
That’s because they saw themselves in the certain light and we’re very rigid about it where their clients had a whole different view of who they were, how they served, what they meant to their progress as a company to grow. It painted a very different picture in the mind.
David: Not only does that provide the clarity, like we talked about earlier, but there’s an emotional connection that that creates. If you said, “David, what is it that you do?” I didn’t talked about, “I work on messaging and negotiation, objection, handling all that kind of stuff.” In the why I said, “What I do, I train sales teams but typically, people come to me when they’ve tried all of the best and current sales methodologies out there and they found that none of them work, none of them really speaks to them or suit their business, then they come to me.”
I just made that on the spot here, just for fun. The idea is I can imagine this cohort of sad salespeople who are just lamenting with that but nothing is working anymore. “David, please, come help us.” There’s that emotion. Invoking emotion is very, very powerful as well in the introduction, as we negotiate, as we handle objections. We’d like to think that we’re all very logical beings but we are much more governed by our emotions.
Being able to invoke those emotions and everything we do in selling, in an authentic way, I’m not saying playing tricks on people but invoking the appropriate amount of emotion can be very, very powerful.
Marylou: We’re running close to end of time. The big message I got today was our love of learning and that the sales machine is one that is constantly changing, that the constant in sales is change, and that there are really two ways for us to start tackling how to have more authentic conversations, top of funnel, is where I’m talking.
David obviously covers the whole thing but it’s looking at how we structure our messaging and how we deliver that messaging to prospects so that the end result is that we’re getting more opportunities or having more authentic conversation. We’re really learning about the value our prospects sees in us and clients. David, how do people get a hold of you to continue this love of learning and really work on improving their messaging? How should we reach you?
David: The two best ways, first of all, check out the website cerebralselling.com. I give everything away for free there, all of my articles, content, podcast, videos, the whole thing. By all means, avail yourself of that. You can certainly get in touch with me through the website and you can also hit me up on LinkedIn, very accessible there as well.
Marylou: I’ll be sure, as everyone knows, to put on your page all these links. I’ll also make sure that I steer them towards that definition you had about the levels of awareness. When we’re offline, go ahead and send me that link to that one particular blog post because I really hit that a lot, of how to craft your messaging so that you’re not making assumptions as to where people are in their head but you’re more trying to breadcrumb them to a place where they’ll wanna have a conversation with you.
Forward that link over to me and I’ll be sure to get it on the website. Other than that, thank you so much for your time. This was a great conversation. I’m hoping that some of our folks here really take advantage and look you up and start a dialogue with you.
David: My pleasure, Marylou. Thank you so much for having me, this was fantastic.