Marylou: Hello there, it’s Marylou Tyler. I was a guest a few weeks ago on a podcast that was just so much fun that I invited the host of that podcast to come onto my podcast today. Pat Helmer’s here. He’s a podcaster for a radio show, Sales Babble. He’s also an interesting man because he does a lot of consulting and coaching for tech start-ups, start-ups that are through friends, families, colleagues have inched their way into the million dollar range or higher up to $5 million. But then, they have to concentrate on really putting stuff together properly in order to get further, he specializes in that as well. Welcome, Pat, to the podcast. It’s great to have you.

Pat: It’s so great to be here, Marylou. This is such an honor.

Marylou: We’re going to do something a little bit different today. As I’m told from you’re, going to surprise me as to the format of my show. I’d like to start with you’ve obviously been doing this for quite some time now. I’ve talked to a plethora of colleagues and experts. Let’s talk about a subject that’s near and dear to your heart, which sounds like we’re going to hit the qualifying subject. Is that correct?

Pat: Exactly correct.

Marylou: Let’s start by helping our audience understand what the main problem is that you’ve encountered or that you see over and over again that today, what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk to them about the problem, give them a solution and ask them to take action, today.

Pat: Today, important to not just listen, to not just be infotainment, but to actually better yourself. That’s what we’re going to do today.

Marylou: What specifically about qualifying is it that gets your blood boiling?

Pat: I think, how many times I’ve been to a network meeting and you shake hands with people. The first thing they do is they start spouting off this product or service that they have and you can’t get them to stop.

Marylou: Probably a lot.

Pat: It’s like they haven’t taken the time to figure out whether or not you’re even the right kind of person to purchase something that they have. People do this on the phone too. They call up and they start talking. They don’t take the time to see whether or not you’re the kind of person that would buy from them. That’s what we commonly call qualifying. Are you qualified to purchase what I have? Far too often, people believe that if they just talk fast enough, it’s going to be totally obvious that the stuff that I have is terrific and you should write me a check right now, hand over your credit card. That happens, doesn’t it?

Marylou: Indeed. Well, I’m re break it down in the framework that I put together. We go for fit and then for qualification. There’s always a ton of information on LinkedIn and colleagues chiming in as to the perfect band or the perfect set of questions to ask. I kind of take that with a grain of salt because I really think it depends on the situation.

Pat: I agree. I have a framework of questions that we’re going to go through, what I call the sort questions and what I call the dum questions.

Marylou: Alright. Where do you want to start?

Pat: We could start with the sort questions. To a certain degree, sales a race to value. The sooner that we conceive, if you can provide value to them, the better. If you can’t provide value with them, you’d be probably better off to move on. Stop wasting their time, stop wasting your time, and go work on some other lead.

I did a study last year, the number one problem that people had was we don’t have enough leads and the number two problem was we don’t have enough time. Those are the kinds of the things that we should be working on. The trick is, remember I said before, what it was? People said, “If you just listen hard enough, you’ll want to buy my stuff.” It is about listening but you really have to turn around and you have to be the listener. The best way to do that is to build a process around that as if it’s a repeatable process, then it’s much more likely you’re going to be successful.

The first set of questions are what I call the sort questions. The first question are the story questions. Commonly, the kinds things that I like to ask people are who are you, where did you come from? Maybe where the company came from? Where you came from? Where are you at right now? What is your happily ever after? What do you want to happen in the future? If you just start asking people about themselves, they love to tell you, especially if you do it in a very conversational way.

What are you guys about? Where are you at right now? They may be saying good things that are happening to the company, but they also start probably sharing a little bit of challenges and problems that they’re having. If you ask them, “Where do you see the company going in four, five years?” Something like that, or the business or the new product and services they’re providing. Then, they’ll tell you.

Once you got them warmed up, then you move to the O questions, the obstacle questions. The kinds of questions I like to ask are, “What are the things that are stopping you from reaching you happily ever after?” Make sense?

Marylou: Yes.

Pat: They’ll start giving you a list of things that are issues and you’ll go, “Okay. Okay. Okay.” You should be mentally writing these down. If you’re on the telephone, I would physically be writing them down. Every time they say an obstacle, I’m on the notion of saying, “What else?” This is something I was taught many years ago when I was doing market research for a market research company. It’s surprising if you keep asking what else the things that will come out of people.

Then, the third thing you ask are the R questions, those are the ramification questions. What that goes to is that because in this obstacle, you would ask them, “What are the ramifications of that happening on your business? What’s the bad things that would be happening because of this?” What that actually should do is start making them angry and uncomfortable. It’s like your goal to a certain degree is to make them not feel very good. They’ll start saying, “Well because, one problem, our costs or skyrocketing.” “Oh my Goodness,” “Because of this other problem, our revenues are dropping.” “Oh my goodness.” “This other problem that I mentioned? That obstacle stops our profits and they’re decreasing. This obstacle is decreasing our quality and this one is increasing our frustration and people are quitting.” That’s the kind of goal that you’re looking for.

Marylou: Agitate.

Pat: Agitate. And then you try to set them aside. We go to the T questions, the transformation questions. How would it transform your company if we would take all those obstacles and make those disappear? Poof! Away. Then, they would see a light at the end of the tunnel, they would think, “Well, that would be traffic. If we could knock that up obstacle down, then our revenues will increase. If we can knock that one down, our costs would decrease.” You just got to walk through all those things.

Now that you have a much better understanding, you can ask yourself do you have something that can provide value for them? You may read that they don’t. This to a certain degree, all sales is a matchmaking process. Am I a good match for you and are you a good match for me? What we’re always looking at to do is we’re trying to go as fast as we can. We need to race to value. We’re looking to see whether or not they’re a match or not a match. If you can find that they’re not a match, then you move on.

There’s three more questions we have to ask, the dum questions, whether or not they’re a good match. The first one is, “How do you guys make decisions about transformation? How do you make decision about buying things? Changing things? Or modifying things, increasing your process?” What you learned from that is whether or not they’re the decision maker, jointly, collectively.

Lots of organization have lots of different ways for approach. That’s the next question you want to know. How do you make these kind of decisions? Then you ask the U questions, the urgency question. When are you looking to do something like this, to improve this, to take these obstacles and start addressing them and to make those go away?

The last one is what commonly comes of that, the money question or the funding question. Have you set aside budgets to do something like this? Once you get a yes out of all of these, then and only then is a time for you to start pitching a solution. Does that make sense?

Marylou: Makes total sense. In our world where there are some reps that these roles are separated, that is also the point in time where you decide whether this particular opportunity is ready for hand-off to the quota carrying side of the house. We do have some of our audience who work in sales organizations where the roles are separated. And then of course, there are the folks who prospect, close and service accounts all in one role, they do it all.

What I really like about this is that you are taking the time upfront to learn about your prospect, that’s so important. You’ll hear keywords and phrases and just little nuggets that if you do your homework and if you’ve studied you product and service, you should be able to link some of these obstacles to case studies, use cases, pieces of information that can help later on provide more specificity around how those problems were solved by your clients that went before them. There’s a good social proof built into that once you really listen to what the problems and challenges they’re experiencing. You already have that map in your head that these are the solutions that you’re able to give and also the specificity improves if a client of yours has done that already, at various stages of success.

Pat: I agree. I work with a lot of startups, and one of the big problems that they have is they have an itch that needs scratching and they go invent something. To them, it seems obvious that everybody should want to buy it. They haven’t taken the time to really get to know who their ideal client is. They haven’t built that value proposition. Because they haven’t gone through these kinds of questions over and over again and to see these recurring things, these recurring sets of obstacles and how it affects their business, it’s very difficult for them to even pitch a solution because they don’t know their language. We have a secret language and we need to learn that language. The best way you can learn it is to listen.

Marylou: Amen. We have sort, we have dum.

Pat: Yes.

Marylou: Our listeners are like, “Okay, they told me that we’re going to have to do something now.”

Pat: Picture the possibility. If you were to write these down, what do you think would be the obstacles that your prospective clients would have? What do you think because of these obstacles, how do you think it affects their business? How do you think their business would be transformed if those were cut away? Can you answer those? If you’re a seller and you can’t answer those questions, if you’re not really absolutely certain, I have an exercise where I’ve had to write down 10 questions for each one of those. You should truly, deeply understand what those are.

This is what I mean by having methodical process, you have something preset. Every time you’re doing the sales call or anytime you’re communicating with a prospective client, you have an agenda in mind and you know exactly what you’re going to ask. You’re going to take this process to get to a place where I can see whether it’s a match or it’s not a match. And the sooner it’s not a match, the better. I can move on to the next one, that way you’re not wasting time with people who aren’t qualified, who are aren’t ready to buy right now. They might be three months, six months, a year, but better to find people who have a true need or desire right now that they want to address.

Marylou: This is such a great framework because it does force you to think through the obstacles, the outcomes and the opportunities and then overlay that with specificity later on. I’m thinking email engine too because I know that what we’re talking about right now is the actual call or face to face but there is also a component of what the work that I do that leverages technology in the form of female engines. This particular cadence that you’re describing is also what we use in crafting our email sequences. You actually said the word themes. That’s what we call them for the obstacles, the themes. What are the themes for the email sequence that we know will resonate sooner than later with our prospects. This is all to help us warm up that chill for the first call.

Pat: We could totally turn this paradigm away from sales into marketing. Not so much about your ideal clients, but about your avatar. Unless you truly understand what your avatar is like or not like, how can you write an autoresponder series in your email?

Marylou: You don’t, you just spray and pray.

Pat: That just doesn’t work.

Marylou: It doesn’t.

Pat: You don’t want to live on that space. Picture, you could use a framework like this to do market research on a market niche that you think you want to address. By asking these questions, they’re going to be saying, if we interviewed a dozen people, they’re going to be giving me these quotes that are just lovely, that you’d want to stick in an autoresponder series. “I can’t believe our costs were going up because of this problem. I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t sleep at night.”

Marylou: I know that a lot of our listeners are probably thinking is there a standard list of questions that I can start from in each area, or is it really something where I sit down and look at a blank piece of paper, write down SORT, followed by DUM and start filling in the page? What do you recommend for our audience?

Pat: That would be the latter, not the former. One thing about sales babble is I’ve interviewed people on all kinds of industries all over the world. Selling is very different actually in some things, in some businesses than in others. I really think it’s good to be something specific to your business.

But surprisingly, I think if you think it out and write down, let’s say I was to write out 10 obstacle questions. You might know them. You actually might already know them just by dumb luck of being in the industry, or you might not and that’s okay. If that’s the case, then it’s worth going back to your clients that you have right now that were happy and asking them these questions. “At the time that you bought from us, what was your story? At the time that you bought from us, what were the obstacles that you were facing? At the time that you bought from us, what were the ramification of those obstacles on your business? What were the challenges that you were facing? And then once you bought us, how did that transform your business?” Probably out of that, you’re going to get terrific quotes that you can then stick on your brochures.

Marylou: Right. For those folks in complex sales who are listening to this, it’s so great to grab the different people, the different avatars that may be ebbing and flowing in at top of funnel especially as you’re trying to get and march that opportunity down towards close. You may be dealing with different people who bought for different reasons. You don’t want to just nail one and then not do the others if there are more people that are coming into your world as you’re working through the sales process. This exercise that Pat’s talking about is great to do for any avatar persona that you think is going to be valuable either a direct or indirect influence to your target and of course your target themselves.

Pat: It’s interesting you mention something there about the close. It’s actually very easy to close once you’ve gone through this process. The question becomes just simply as that you mentioned you had all these issues and you noticed how our solutions addresses each of those. You kind of walk through them one by one. See we addressed that? See we addresses this? You get them to nod their heads up and down. You go, well, it looks to me like we’re a good match for you. You just simply say, “Well, let’s get started. Let’s start rolling it out. Who do I talk to about that? We have a process for that, who should we start working with on that?”

Marylou: All those are great ways to help get people moving. That’s what we want. We want people to move, listeners included. Homework from this podcast is to really take those acronyms. I’ll give you some examples of my sort and dum in the show notes so that you have them there, because everybody knows I like to do what my hosts tell me that they’re going to have my audience do. I also do the homework, I’ll be sure to put out my questions. A lot of you know I’ve worked on these already because I call it a success path but it’s the same similar type of thing.

For those of us who are working on email streams which we dabble in marketing a little bit at the side of the funnel, this is absolutely wonderful to start thinking about how you’re going to organize your emails, especially the ones that you’re working on in what we call the working status where you create the template and then you hyper personalize depending on who you’re talking to and then what position they are in the pipeline. These are great ways to get them thinking through where they are, where they want to be, and then most importantly how you’ve shown others how they got there and are now enjoying that transformation. What else would you like to share with our group, Pat?

Pat: I think that’s a lot right there. If you could just do one thing this week, it’s to really listen, genuinely listen to what people are saying to you when you meet with them. Not pitch too soon, but deeply try to understand what is the need or the desire that they’re looking for. To see whether or not you can add value to their lives. Listen, it’s the best way to know what people are thinking. You don’t have to guess. Ask them, they’ll tell you. People want to share what’s going on in their lives. I can go on and on about this.

Marylou: Silence is always a good thing too. Don’t be afraid of the silence after you ask a question. Don’t feel that you have to fill that void with something else. I see that a lot, we can’t just sit back and let silence happen. Maybe they’re thinking about what they want to tell you, don’t interrupt.

Pat: I got to give a demo. The power of asking questions and letting them ruminate over it.

Marylou: It’s unsettling when you first experience it or force yourself to do it, but after a while you welcome it. You just let them do, let them sit. They’re probably thinking through all the different things that could happen, what happened, should happen. You’re their guide, you have to think of it that way. They’re the hero, you’re their guide. You’re listening and waiting for them to respond. Don’t interrupt.

Pat: I have this feeling, I don’t know if there’s data behind this, but I have this feeling that the more they talk, the more likely they’ll buy.

Marylou: Yes. I have been told on many occasions that I have been so helpful to people. 90% of the time when you listen back to those conversations, I said one thing at the beginning. The rest of the time, it was them talking.

Pat: I’m a natural asking questions and letting people do the talking.

Marylou: Hence, that’s why you’re a great show host.

Pat: That’s why I went in the podcast I guess, it’s probably something to that. I remember I read a story that Dale Carnegie once said, he would go to this dinners and he would ask people who he was sitting next to about their lives. That would be it, he had to kick off the first question and then they would start talking. He said at the end of the night they would say to him, “This has been the best discussion that I ever had with somebody, you are a master conversationalist.”

Marylou: Yes, I remember reading that. I’ve heard Jay Abraham who’s a very good friend. He tells a story about someone he met, he went to Beijing or something, went up to the concierge room, sat down, saw a guy sitting over by the window, did the Dale Carnegie, asked him one question. Three hours later, the guy finished the conversation and said the same thing, this is the best night I’ve had. Jay said he just really asked him one question and that was it.

Good lessons, people, definitely. The art of listening is one area to take away for this week and then definitely I’ll put those acronyms out there. I think that’s a wonderful way to remember how to carry on a conversation with your prospects. Pat, how do we get a hold of you if we want to learn more of the Pat wisdom?

Pat: Google Pat Helmers, I pop to the top. If they want to listen to the podcast, it’s at www.salesbabble.com. I’m in iTunes and Player FM, Stitcher and all those. If you like, I’d be more than happy to build a worksheet for you with the sort questions.

Marylou: That would be awesome, I would really love that. We’ll get that going and have that out there for them. We very much appreciate the time you spent with us and look forward to hearing more of the Sales Babble podcast. Great group over there of people, they were really excited about the podcast that you and I did about the seven healthy phone habits because they got a lot of requests for that. It went really well, it’s good. My LinkedIn blog post went crazy the other day because of your troops.

Pat: They’re really smart people. They want to get better who are embracing sales. You’re a great guest. I was honored to have you on there, and it has been an honor to be here visiting you.

Marylou: Well, thank you. I really enjoyed it and we’ll have you back again I’m sure, there are so many topics to talk about, so little time.

Pat: I almost started a few.

Marylou: Qualification is good, this is good. This is where people get stuck a lot in the pipeline. Also that first conversation, what to say when they say hello on the other end. That’s another area that we can go, but I think that’s another area that I’m sure you have some great advice on, that first conversation. We’ll be sure to stay tuned to your podcast and again, Pat thank you so much, I enjoyed having you on the show today.

Pat: It’s been terrific. Thank you.

Marylou: Hi everyone! It’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have the third part, I don’t know if you guys listened to the other two, but we are part three of this amazing document that came out this year with a collaboration between three companies and I’ll let William tell you all about that. William Wickey is here from Lead Genius. He’s the media and content strategy expert over there. Lead Genius for those of you who may not know is a B2B Lead Gen solution. They are the ones who fill our top of funnel with fabulous lead records that have higher probability of closing with high revenue potential but I’ll let him talk more about that.

Today, we’re going to discuss this guide that they released in 2017. It’s jampacked with information, tools based, it talks about how to select the tools and give you an understanding of its form versus function and we cover that in my book too about defining your process first and then align the tools with the process so, without the further ado, William, welcome!

William: Thank you very much, Marylou! I’ve been looking forward to chat with you and it’s great to speak with your audience.

Marylou: Yeah, thank you. Tell us about what brought on the need for a book like this? I know that when I visit clients, they have this thing called a stack. The stack may or may not be the right stack and it’s jampacked, not all companies but some companies have very conceivable tool known to man but your guide is the breath of fresh air and navigating through that landscape.

Tell us about what caused you to do this? How often do you do this? What your thoughts are on the problems you are seeing out there and how this guide will help solve some of these problems?

William: Absolutely, yeah. Again, thank you for the generous introduction. My name is William Wickey, a lead content media strategy over at Lead Genius. We recently teamed up with some of the kind folks over at Prezi and Ambition. Jeremy Boudinet wanted a coop on this ebook, it was on the podcast with Marylou recently so I definitely encourage you guys to all check out that interview with them, some great stuff in there.

The ebook we put together is call The 2017 Trends and Tech Guide for B2B marketing and sales, you can find it at b2btrendsandtech.com. What this book does is it outlines some of the big trends we see in the marketplace when it comes to the B2B industry as a whole, specifically focusing on sales and marketing teams but also getting into operations and even higher level trends than that.

From there, we talk about what does trends mean for companies? Some of the needs that arise because of these different trends. Finally, give some suggestions for some of the solutions you’re going to want to check out if you see some of these needs in your own company.

This is the second year we’ve done something similar to this. We did a Trends and Tech Guide last year. Myself and Jeremy have also partnered up on a book about account-based marketing, coverage and the gap, that’s a few months old now but I’ll tell people who are interested in account-based marketing to check that out, accountabasedebook.com. That is one of the trends we’ve talked about in B2B Trends and Tech here.

The reason we put it together the way that we did is that as you and your listeners know, there’s no shortage of trends and tech guides out there and I’m not going to try and convince people that this is an entirely unique concept. There’s a million of these floating around out there. What is a little bit different is the way we organize this. We wanted to do it really, really well. So far, we’ve had some great feedback from a lot of users in the industry and people have gotten some value out of this.

Normally, there’s a trends guide or something that comes out at the beginning of every year that says, here’s what’s big and what’s going on for 2017 or 200x, whatever it is. Then you’ll see a bunch of tech guides come out listing all the different things that you can use in your marketing and sales technology stack. They’re typically difficult to navigate, categories are overlapping when it comes to things like sales enablement. Those tools fall into a lot of different categories now. There’s no [00:09:34] tools that have analytics function, and have outreach functions and being part of putting together guides like this in the past, it can be difficult to figure out what goes where.

That’s exactly the problem that you are moving to when you say the technology stacks are getting heavy. We see that pain point with the customers that we worked with every day, the same goes for the folks at Ambition and Prezi. There’s a lot of technology to keep track of. It’s difficult to make sense of everything that’s happening in the market.

Often times, your marketing and sales team will say, I’ve got this one single need and I need to find technology that’s going to help me address it. They go out there, find the technology, that technology ends up doing a handful of different things, some of them they use, some of them you don’t, and it ends up getting pretty cluttered once you do that again and again and again over a couple of years and maybe over the process of a couple of different decision makers or one person and a single department adopts a technology that ends up affecting someone on the other side of the organization. It can get really complicated.

With b2btrendsandtech.com, we decided to take an approach where we say here’s the big stuff that’s happening, forget about the technology to start with, let’s talk about the trends, let’s talk about the needs that arise from those trends. And then, let’s give you a couple of the different solution that you might want to check out if you see those needs in your organization.

Marylou: Are there basically use cases that can help guide us? Because one of the things that I think is difficult, I have in my office right now a landscape picture that has icons for all the different vendors under all the different types of categories. It’s up to me to say, okay, email marketing, go look at the 10-15 little boxes over there and figure out from there what I should even start looking at. It would be nice if there are certain recipes that we can get started with. Does your guide give you a little bit of a nudge as to if your emphasis is here, then do this or what?

William: We don’t go into recipes per se, you’re exactly right. If there is a prescription for exactly what you need, we have some content that is a little bit similar to that on each of our blogs but the ebook is a little bit higher level, it’s not a use case necessarily. The trends are speaking to things that are big shifts in the industry as a whole. Every single one of them isn’t going to necessarily impact your company or your organization equally.

In terms of being actionable with this type of guide, what we recommend is looking at the trends that you see affecting your company the most. Sometimes people don’t necessarily connect the trend to the need itself. For example, people might say, my CEO is telling me that I need to align my marketing and sales department, that’s something I keep hearing from the C Suite. Sometimes you hear that so much you forget where all that’s coming from.

What we do is we start a step back and we point to a large trend like the growth and importance in customer experience. Customer experience is one of the trends we have on ebook and customer experience. In many ways, it’s similar to a concept to full funnel marketing. Speaking to a customer from the time you bring them into the very top of the funnel, to the time that they’re talking with sales, to the time that they’re closes, to the time that they are experiencing the product and getting value out of it all the way through getting them to re-sign the deal and eventually become advocates. This is something that marketers have always had on their radar for a long time but it’s renamed this customer experience thing. That is a big shift we see in the industry.

If you see the need for alignment becoming of increasing importance, that’s something we point to as one of the reasons that’s happening and that big trend is also affecting some other things in your organization. If you see that, we suggest some different technologies that you should investigate and evaluate.

Marylou: I like that. I think we have been hearing some buzz words, some technologies, some methods, some ways of conducting business that really not changed, I’ve been doing this now for going on 30 years so, it’s renamed in my world, it’s repurposed.

But for example, what’s affected us at top of funnel is account-based selling versus lead. When predictable revenue was written, we talked about leads, we talked about contact records and now, we’re talking about accounts. If we look at the analogy of a house, we were talking about the house before or now we’re talking about the house with the people in the house, before we were talking about the individual person.

That hasn’t really changed with the way we communicate because no longer can we do a mass type of email engine and spray and pray out there which is wonderful, I think, because I’m a fan of getting as personalized as possible, given the record flow. That’s a trend that lends itself to different technology.

Like you said, you take it up a notch and you’re talking really about the experience of the eventual customer in our world, they’re not a customer yet or a client yet, but if we start off the conversation on the wrong foot, it’s going to make it a lot more difficult for us to get to close versus if we start the conversation with more respect and authenticity then we’re going to have a better shot at bringing these folks into our universe.

A lot of that is based on whether or not we’d leverage technology where technology makes sense. That’s where these tools are coming in now. We used to say when direct mail days that the mail was salesmanship in print and that was coined by the copywriters of the century there, I can’t remember the name of the guy.

Email for us is salesmanship in electronic, in digital. We have to make sure we’re utilizing the right tools that gives us the flexibility to customize where we need it but also help us with our workflow because a lot of times we’re still working with a number of records at top of funnel and we have to be able to reach people and do it in a way that is respectful. Your guide looks at that as a trend and the tools that we put together and assemble like Lego blocks, it reminds me of, you can do it wrong and you can do it correctly and I’ve seen a lot of bad assembly going on.

William: You’re exactly right. Account-based marketing is one of the trends that we have. Account-based marketing, coming of age, in fact, because it’s not necessarily coming on people’s radar for the first time, especially the people in your audience who are familiar with the industry. There was a lot of talk about ABM last year, it was a hot buzzword.

Marketers and salespeople love their buzz words and we’re not innocent in that regard. We try to make it simple and decouple some of these buzzy terms from their actual meaning, focus on the meaning. Account-based marketing without a doubt is coming of age in 2017. There was a lot of talk about it last year and now, you’ve got a lot of companies saying themselves, okay, from a operation and a practical perspective and even from a strategy perspective, how do I switch from lead oriented, lead generation engine to something that is account-based? How do I switch from contacts to accounts?

For people who are not as familiar with the differences between these two different approaches to filling a funnel, it might seem fairly minor, contacts versus accounts, why is that such a big deal? Once you get into the nitty gritty of operations and lead routing and scoring and how you set goals or rapport, it becomes clear that there’s a significant difference.

Companies are saying to themselves, how do I make this transition smoothly? How do I not lose the rapport on the things that I’ve been doing the past couple of years or longer? How do I not abandon the things that work? But then also shift towards this new approach to selling which is undoubtedly the way business to business deals are being transacted which is a decision-making panel. Lots of people are involved in decision making processes when it comes to B2B orgs, especially the larger the deal size, the more that product affects an organization, the more departments that are affected by that purchase and the longer the contract, a lot of people are selling yearlong contracts.

The decision-making panel is what you want to target for a number of different reasons. We try and point people to the right tools when they see that that trend is something that is happening not only in the industry, but as a need that is happening in their organization. Where should you go start looking for adapting the right tools to support that strategy?

Email is a big piece of that. The same email tools that you use for, to stay at the top of the funnel and email marketing tool doesn’t necessarily fill the same need as when you prospect to an organization with very personalized simple emails, that’s another trend that we’re seeing. Personalization is something that is huge in 2017 to a large degree. I see the more content perspective and marketing perspective, usually the B2B industry following the B2C industry when it comes to things like personalization. They’ve had a right in B2C or been at least few steps forward when it comes to personalization for maybe a year or two now and this is the coming of increasing importance on the B2B side.

Personalization though in a B2B context typically doesn’t have all the flashes and flare that you sometimes have when it comes to the personalization on similar websites. It often takes the form of a simple email that speaks directly to an individual, their role, where that role fits within their organization, their needs and plain simple e-mail we see being super effective. Getting the right data in order to send that e-mail, having the right data in order to target, to segment, get that person into the right campaign is tricky. We have some recommendations for tools that people should try and check out. Those are things you want to accomplish for either a marketing team or a sales team.

Marylou: William, before we end, I want to ask a question that you may or may not have a strong opinion about it but I’m curious. You’re a marketing guy, I’m a saleslady, and there’s ops, sales ops, the people who track all these wonderful data for us and help us make more informed decisions. If we were to gather up folks in our company, sit around the fire and look at your book, your guide book, who would be the people that we would want to do this together, in your opinion?

William: What’s interesting I think that’s happening with all those roles that you mentioned is that there is that process of holding on the fire happening whereas in the past it actually hasn’t. That’s kind of a scenario that was not really happening in a lot of worlds a couple years ago and now you’ve got marketing teams and sales teams doing weekly syncs, sitting down with those marketing ops and sales ops people and hashing a lot of things out in customer success and product when it comes to a lot of these trends.

Especially account-based marketing, it really is a full team effort required to execute on a lot of this. A lot of teams and a lot of B2B companies, especially in recurring revenue based models, have most of their income coming from upsells and coming from existing customers. It’s really important that marketing and sales are highly coordinated with customer success and product.

I think that in a lot of organizations, this is something we’ve done at Lead Genius, there’s sort of a defined ‘revenue function’ that is coordinating the efforts between marketing, sales, customer success, demand generation, and product. Companies are bringing in CROs, Chief Revenue Officers, and I believe that their main function in most capacity is to align all those different departments and get them rolling in the right direction. If it was who to get in the room and read this book, it’s all of those people.

I would recommend marketing and sales people to get this book, see if it aligns with their goals, see if it aligns with how they’re seeing the marketplace, take a look at the way we put together b2btrendsandtech.com and then, share that with the people in other departments like customer success, product, if there’s a defined demand like new revenue function that incorporates a lot of these different aspects and demand gens. Share with them as well. They might not be quite as up to speed as you on some of these other elements.

In many ways, the purpose of this document is not just to inform the marketing and sales audience, it’s put a piece of collateral in their hands that they can use to help align the other folks in their organization, start pulling in the same direction, get everyone in the same page. That’s the biggest thing that all these departments can do when it comes to success and predictable prospecting in 2017.

Marylou: That’s great. For those of you who are at smaller companies, they heard all those roles and they’re like, wow, really? This will work in all companies, all sizes. It’s just as you move up market, you’re going to have a few more roles that are doing certain liaison activities.

The thing that I love about this is that it does open up the discussion between the different areas with the end goal in mind which is in many cases more revenue, more consistent revenue, better forecasting, for those of you who are answering to a Board of Directors, you owe it to yourselves to align the organization so that it’s a smoother running pipeline with less gunk in it and less duplication of effort.

To maximize return on effort starts with getting a book like this, a guide, sitting down with your colleagues, hashing out these and those types of things, the what-if scenarios and coming up with a great plan because planning doesn’t cost anything. It’s with when you start executing, you start purchasing these tools, if you don’t do it right, you’re going to see the result of that very quickly that you didn’t take the time to plan which means involving everyone who touches the customer, the client from prospect through close and beyond.

Thank you so much William for your time. I really appreciate it. Now, I’ll put on the show notes for everybody the links to the website that has the guide. If there’s anything else that you want to include, we’ll go ahead and put it on the show notes for your page so people have easy access to get the guide download it and then the other tools, calculators whatever you have that you want to put out there, we’ll get that out there for our audience. Thanks again.

William: Thank you Marylou, great speaking with you.

Marylou:       Hi everyone! It’s Marylou Tyler. Today we have a guest from Brazil, whose name is Vitor Bruno. He is an English teacher in Brazil, has a very varied background, so I will let him tell you more about where he’s been and what he’s doing now. What we’re gonna talk about today is the differences in selling between Brazil, or places like that, and the United States. Specifically, we’re gonna focus on social tools.

                    Vitor, welcome to the podcast!

Vitor:           Hi, Marylou! Nice to talk to you, too. It’s a pleasure.

Marylou:      Tell us about your path, your background, and how the heck you got into sales.

Vitor:           As you said, my name is Vitor Bruno. I came to Florianópolis Metropolitan area, [ College Paleo Oso 0:01:11], where I came to sell a software that works with water and wastewater piping. But by that time, the economic view in Brazil wasn’t so good. After six months trying to sell or to make client lists and adding to the pipeline, I end up getting out of the company that I came to work, but I start to teach English. That is what I am making money actually.

Marylou:      Okay. English as a second language to Brazilians or various people?

Vitor:           Yes. And also English for special purpose.

Marylou:      Okay. Very good. We met, you and I, on LinkedIn, which is a social media platform. What is your experience on using social tools that you can share with the audience, and what is working for you now in terms of getting new business?

Vitor:           Most of all, I started to search for new customers or to understand the customers I already have by looking through their profiles. This way, I try to make a network web of people that can have the same interest. It helps me to understand better the audience and what they need or they don’t.

Marylou:      The equivalent here would be, in my new book, it’s looking at the prospect personas and getting an understanding of who’s gonna be sitting across the table from you, whether it’s virtual or not, what their characteristics are, and how to craft your sales conversation in order to speak with them in a way that gets them sort of leaning in and wanting to have a conversation with you.

                    You went through that process by looking at your files, finding out who these people are that bubbled up to the top of wanting to have a conversation, and then what did you do when you had these characteristics? What was your next step?

Vitor:           I started to take notes because I don’t want to forget. My memory is very fuzzy sometimes. I try to understand and to build like a character, not to be lying to the prospect, but to find the things that takes his guard off. Part of my teaching skills, I use what people want to know, what they want to learn, and what they needed to learn as a job or stuff like that. These two things work as motors to make people continue studying with more energy and more enthusiasm.

Marylou:      Okay. You actually went and worked through what we call a “pain matrix” which is taking all of the criteria or the aspects of that personality, that persona, and understanding what drives them, also overlaying that with what you think they needed in order to be successful. Is that correct?

Vitor:           Not exactly. I don’t use pain to sell. I use mostly what gives pleasure instead. For example, I have a student who loves a lot of rock and roll, so part of the course is to talk about rock and roll bands, to read the lyrics. He’s an oil and gas engineer in the state company so I taught him rock and roll. Then vocabulary – choose to learn better how to (I don’t know if it’s addictions) – it’s when somebody from the government starts to read or to check is everything is correct in the oil platform.

Marylou:      You actually use pleasure as a trigger in order to be able to engage your students, so that they would learn the material. That’s how you got them also interested in the service that you offered. Is that correct?

Vitor:           Yes. Exactly.

Marylou:      When you have these lists of people and you’ve worked through the desires that they have, how do you go about finding students or finding new people who could use your products and services?

Vitor:           I started to look at all my networks if I know someone or someone alike this person. For example, it’s a director of a big company. Who do I know that’s a director of a company, to make it like fake selling, not really selling. It’s like pre-selling, to know what this director would look for, what he wouldn’t like – to make fake selling, but also once I find this person in the company I want to sell, I start to look at him as an ambassador. He will help me to sell inside the company.

                    Like today, I went to search Sergei Foundation. It’s a start-up foundation here in Florianópolis. I said, “Okay, my friend, I know you like this and this and that. I need your help to introduce. You’re gonna help me to find the things that the other start-ups need in common so you can help me sell a better product, too, because it’s gonna be good for you as well.”

                    He said, “Okay. Let’s go for it.”

Marylou:      That’s great. A teaching point here, for those listening. What Vitor just talked about was what we really advocate – is when you find someone in a company, you’re looking for a champion, you’re looking for a referral source to refer you other business, and you’re building your network at the same time. But as Vitor pointed out, you’re adding value. When you are asking for a referral, you always add value to that person as to the why that they should refer you business. That’s great!

                    You go in. You get referrals, and then from there, does your process involve meeting them face to face? Or do you have a way to converse with them over the telephone? How do you take it from there?

Vitor:           Most of the time, I look to talk face-to-face and not very fond of using phone to sell. I think phone selling mostly, from my point of view, is a little bit too cold. Here in Brazil, people like to see people in the eye, to be sure that they are real. It’s not a fake proposition. It’s something more realistic.

Marylou:      Right. That’s a very different strategy than what we deploy here in the States because a lot of times, we use email first because it’s easier. But if we really want to engage someone in conversation and reduce what I call the “lag” in the pipeline, we utilize the telephone for that. It’s very uncommon here – at least I’m trying to think of any clients that I have that go face-to-face because of logistics, because a lot of times, we represent clients all over the country. It’s very difficult for us to travel like that.

                    It’s not that it doesn’t happen, but until they’re a client, we typically don’t – unless they’re a top-20 type of client, a core account, where it’s an account that has a large revenue potential for us and a longer lifetime value, we don’t necessarily do face-to-face here. That’s a big difference from Brazil.

Vitor:           Maybe mostly because my clients are not national wide. For example, I’m living here in Florianópolis and not county, sell to São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, to Rio for example. I try to focus first on my neighborhood, then to find, “Okay, I’m strong in my neighborhood. Now let’s talk around the surrounding cities.” My friends in other cities – to know what are their pain, and growing organically, instead of rushing like you all know I need to be the biggest of all the country, around. I think it’s not necessary to rush as much. Maybe it’s my point of view. It’s not really a Brazilian point of view.

Marylou:      Right. You’re building relationships. This is sounding very similar to the way our real estate organizations conduct business here in the States. It’s a very neighborhood type of sale. It’s referral-based. There is a lot of face-to-face meetings because buyers and sellers typically meet with the agent. There is some business that’s transacted over the phone, but primarily it’s a face-to-face transaction. That is similar to what you’re doing.

                    They rely on systems to help them talk to people, who are ready to go. That’s what the conversation in the work that I do is, “Can we put some of this into a system in order to be able to help you leverage the technology out there, but still have those meaningful conversations?”

                    My question to you, Vitor, is have you developed a system for this type of contact, using social media? Or are you set-up still, where you’re manually working through who you’re gonna contact, when you’re gonna contact them, and how you’re going to be meeting with them? Do you have a system around that now?

Vitor:           To be honest, not really. I use maybe a calendar. I put all the meetings I have. Try to make – once every 15 days to talk to the person, so they do not forget me. But nevertheless, I try to be in contact. It’s not a real system. What I try to make is to post with them on Facebook, to make small bursts (as you say) on the market, to go talk to some friends, or to leave some marks. And this mark-leaving – to make part of several groups. I myself have become a [0:12:32] businessman solutions.

                    I’m part of another coworking space. I can help people who work there. This way, they become my clients. Once I start to offer, “Oh, I know a guy who knows someone that can help you.” Therefore, I’m becoming one myself. I can help to close some links. I think this helps my nature that I like to contact people, to talk with other people, and to be part of several events at the same time.

Marylou:      For those listening, what I’m hearing is that even though you don’t have technology supporting you perhaps (you mentioned your calendar), there is a process. You have a system in place. It may not seem like a system, but you’re consistently doing the things that you need to do, and it’s almost habitual now for you, which is great. That’s what we’re trying to get to, when we’re working on a sales system, is to overlay the components of the system. In your case, there’s a lot of referral, there’s a lot of face-to-face, there’s a lot of building relationships, but it’s done in a way that’s consistent and habitual so that you can forecast your sales better.

Vitor:           Most of the times, I try to intend to be a real friend. I don’t want to be that pushy salesperson that I’m offering something that the client doesn’t need. As the course works, what people want and what people likes – this makes a lot of it less effort.

                    “Do you have time?” “Yes, we have time.”

                    “So let’s go for the course.” “No, I don’t have time. I don’t have the money.”

                    “Fair enough. There’s my card here. Let’s continue talking,” and we continue later.

Marylou:      Which is very authentic. It’s very endearing, but you’re building your network of people who can refer business to you and because you are able to say, “No, that’s fine. I respect that it’s not a good time for you, but maybe someday will be.” You keep in contact with them. You have them in your sequence. You have them in your tickler, your reminder files, to get back to them.

Vitor:           Exactly.

Marylou:      That’s great. If you had some advice, Vitor, of someone who’s just getting started in sales and really wants to bolt on a process or something that they could do consistently, what would you recommend? Where would they start? What was the first thing that you started doing when you started growing your business, that you think will be helpful for other people?

Vitor:           I think, most of all, to understand what the customer needs. What do they need instead of you offering a lot of things, and people are not interested. People receive a lot of noise around the day. If you check what they want, and if you don’t want what I’m offering, maybe you know someone that can help. It is where you can grow a network. I think networking nowadays is growing stronger instead of you being alone yourself. You can ask your referrals, and this will help you a lot.

Marylou:      I have a process that I teach that I actually borrowed from the real estate folks, and it’s called “first intent.” What I do is every morning, before I start my business day, I reach out to 10 people in my network, and I offer assistance if there’s anything that they need, a question answered, or if I can be of any help to them, “please let me know.”

                    Those people who write back to me and ask me a question – sometimes they’ll say, “You know, I’m so glad that you wrote to me. I was just thinking I have a client who needs some help here. Would you mind if I put them in contact with you?” You never know when you’re reaching out to help people, what you’ll get in return.

                    I recommend that as a daily habit, that you reach out to your network; offer assistance, guidance; offer to be able to answer any questions – whatever it is that they need and with nothing in return to ask for. Your network will grow like you would not believe.

Vitor:           I like this idea, Marylou. Do you have this written on your blog? I’m quite sure I didn’t read this before.

Marylou:      I did it over-the-shoulder. What is that called? A screencast. I recorded a video with me going into LinkedIn and actually showing people how to do that. I’ll be sure to put it on the page that we use for what I call show notes, which is how people can get a hold of you. I’ll make sure that I put that “first intent” process, so that people can start using that.

                    It’s a very rewarding process because it’s all about giving back. It’s all about just give, give, give. Those people who respond to you are gonna be your champions, are gonna be your ambassadors. You’re gonna have a network of people that refer business to you, and you refer business to them. I mean, it’s the perfect balance of being able to sell through referrals.

Vitor:           Exactly. I think it would be interesting. Also, as I said, you can understand what the market needs, and you can give exactly what they’re asking for.

Marylou:      Exactly. The lessons that we learned today are primarily the ones that are so important, and that is really understanding who your prospect is, working through – if you have the book Predictable Prospecting, in Chapter 3, it’s all about how to generate and how to build a really good prospect persona for salespeople.

                    Some of you have prospect personas, but they’re built by marketing, which is good. It’s a good baseline, but because the call to action for marketing is to get a marketing-qualified lead, and the call to action for us in sales is to actually get a first meeting – those two profiles are very different. Make sure you work through the examples. I actually have a worksheet that goes along with that chapter. I’ll post where that is as well – that you can work on getting that prospect persona.

                    Then doing this “first intent” using social media or whatever vehicle. Where your people are – that’s another thing that Vitor told us is actually be where the people are. It could be social. It could be face to face. It could having networking groups. But make sure you understand where those places are and do your best to be there.

Vitor:           I would like to add – I’m sorry to cut you – to be remembered. For example, I’m always wearing a red shirt. Here in Santa Catarina, it’s not popular because red color used to be another political party that is not good anymore. But I wear red because very few people wear red here. I’m a little bit far.

                    Also, people joke that I’m the little red point in the city because I’m everywhere, staying around. Of course, as I joke, I can use it to sell myself. “Oh, you’re gonna see a guy in red. That’s me.”

                    “You are Vitor from the Business Association?”

                    “Yes, that’s me in red.”

                    This makes people remember me. People are gonna remember, “Oh, (in English), there’s that guy in red. I don’t know him, but he’s always there.”

Marylou:      That’s great advice – to be remembered. Be who you are and add a little spice to that, and I think that’s great advice. How do we get a hold of you to have more discussion around this topic?

Vitor:           People can send me an email to chief@milestoneenglishcourse.com, they can send me messages through Facebook as well. You can find me with Milestone English Course there on Facebook.

                    I’m not sure if it’s very popular there in America, but people here in Brazil use a lot of WhatsApp to talk. They have a lot of groups as well. You can send me a message to the number +55 (that’s the Brazilian area code) 48 (Santa Catarina area code) 9080341615. That’s my mobile. I also reply WhatsApp.

Marylou:      Okay. What I’ll do is put all this contact information in the show notes so that people can select which one is relevant for them or easiest for them to remember or click through to. Thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate all the way from Brazil! This is great!

Vitor:           Thank you, Marylou. I appreciate you as well. I hope we can have this again sometime.

Marylou:      Of course. Definitely. Thanks again!

Vitor:           Thank you!

Marylou: Hi, it’s Marylou Tyler. I have a wonderful guest today. I just met Deb not too long ago. I’ve been a part of her BrightTALK channel, she’ll tell you more about that. She is a person that we’re going to really love having on the show today because Deb is all about questions. She’s all about discovering the right questions, getting people out of their status quo, out of their stupor, out of the trans so that we can start having those conversations we need at top of funnel. She’s the president of People First xProductivity Solutions. Is that correct, Deb?

Deb: It is. It’s a mouthful.

Marylou: She’s also the author of twenty of the most highly rated sales books of all time according to Hubspot and Amazon. The book is called Discover Questions to Get You Connected. Welcome to the podcast Deb, it’s nice to have you.

Deb: Really nice to be here, Marylou. Thanks for the invitation.

Marylou: Tell us what got you interested in the realm of questioning? I mean, how did you get involved in that? What was is it that you decided that this is something that you’re going to be a master of?

Deb: I think it was my purpose in life. I’m one of those kids who did the same thing all two or three years old too asking why and why and why questions consistently. The problem is I never stopped. I remember my parents and my teacher when I went into school telling me, “Debby, you shouldn’t ask so many questions. It’s not polite to ask questions.” But I just did. I wanted to know.

I got this all worked out. By the time I was in high school, there were actually appropriate places, debates and journalism, to work on the school’s newspaper, becoming a debater. Those were places where questions were a good thing. I went on and got a journalism degree. I kept using questions and rediscovered sales which I’d done a little bit of. I was always the top CampFire Candy sales girl and that kind of thing.

Sales, because I wanted a job at a newspaper and I couldn’t get one on the news side express out of school. I took a sales job in the classified department and questions started serving me really well. When I moved in my first outside territory, I went to the library to find a book on selling. There was only one on the shelf, Spin Selling, of course that was all about questions. Then, I started my own research fast-forward 20 years later, buyer side research on questions and having put a framework together, I decided that there are only ever eight purposes that anybody asks for questions, and that’s the acronym of discover.

Marylou: Wow, okay. This is sounding really juicy. Let me just preface this by I did a webinar on your channel, the BrightTALK channel. It was about phone habits. One of the things I offered up was the calming questions that I ask and there were so many people who downloaded that little file. I’m sure it’s just a tip of the iceberg of what you’re going to share with us today with the discover model. Take it away and tell us all about it.

Deb: Sure. Discover is an acronym. Each of those letters stands for a purpose for asking a question. Sometimes, sellers think too narrowly about questions. We think of them in two ways, we think about using them to qualify a buyer and we think about using them in a discovery process, our sales process. Occasionally, the sellers think about them when they close to do an either or, or just ask kind of a close.

Questions can serve any conversation in a lot more ways. First of all, we know from buyer’s side research and other body support that questions are one of the fastest ways that we can build bond and create trust and rapport with people. Well, thinking about that, changes everything and I love your sales expert channel webinar because you did think about and offer up questions as the way to change things, to change the conversation between the relationship to open up. Really for opening a sale, let’s open a conversation. Let’s open people in a way that they’re thinking. As you said here at the top, that’s about disrupting what they expect from the sales person and creating value. Value makes them pause and think, questions do all that.

Marylou: Let me ask you, we are bombarded with the term creating value. I’m sure my audience is saying, “Okay, here’s that term again.” What does that mean in the questioning world, or how do you ask a question that is a creating value question?

Deb: I love that question. I’m going to break it down a little bit. First of all, let’s just take the term creating value. Here’s how I see it, it’s not the same as the value that’s inherent in your product. Your product, whatever it is, is delivering some kind of value to some people. That’s the bare bone price of admission to ever sell anything.

On top of that, there’s added value, that’s where your company layers in. It’s the deal sweetener, it’s the extras, it’s the differentiators driven by your company and maybe your marketing department. Created value is neither of those things. Created value happens in the moment, in the experience that you are inviting your buyer into with you.

Created value is for that reason never generic. Created value is always spontaneous and it’s always about what’s happening right now, in this moment. If you’re working on the phone, you have to be so present to understand what matters to this buyer, and what matters by the way, I’m not talking about the ultimate value that you’re going to deliver with your product and your company’s added value. I’m talking about why would they even spend 10 more seconds on the phone with you? Did you peak their interest, did your human self bring enough credibility and enough stimulating thoughts that in that moment there’s value for the remaining seconds that I can commit to you. And beyond that, that there is value that you’ve opened up so that I’ll take a full meeting with you and progress through that the process of buying with you, that’s what I mean when I say created value. That’s why questions are the number one way and this isn’t me saying this, these are buyers we’ve interviewed.

In fact, we very recently completed a B2B buyer survey, a panel study through Sta. Clara University with 530 B2B buyers. Among the top behaviors that they told us they want more from sellers are the different kind of questions, dialogues, this rich, stop, make me think, stimulate my brain cells and that’s where buyers are missing something from sellers.

Marylou: That’s great information. Okay, our audience here are process people, we’re prospectors, we’re closers. You mentioned the word model and discover. Is there a way that we can start, I don’t know if mapping is the right word but taking an idea of a question and correlating it to the actual conversation, or are we training ourselves when you say, “To react to the response of the buyer,” is there a script anywhere in here that we can start with to practice to get better at this? What is the normal way for us to start along that path of mastery of asking the right questions?

Deb: Yes, it’s a very delicate balance. You don’t want to become so process driven that your questions get in the way of you relationship. Your questions shouldn’t facilitate the relationship. This is a big mess in the part of some other program that have been in the past or maybe more fairly it would be the misinterpretation of some other program in the past including SPIN.

If you look at SPIN as four questions, 1, 2, 3, 4, I’m done, you’ve missed the real conversation, the connection and the value you could have created. You don’t need to put that caveat out first. And then, there is a process for learning and mastering the art of questioning and the connections and the trust that you can build with questions.

Step one is to first become a question detective to observe what’s happening when people on interviews that you might listen to or watch on TV, to pay attention in conversations. What happens when you ask to three to four close ended questions in a row? What happens when you’re asking questions because you’re fishing to get the answer you already thought of? Versus, what happens when you ask broader questions that push pause and make people think?

Just observing, that’s step one. Having the tool of an idea, of what are some of these higher purpose question. What are the eight purposes, in fact, because most sellers only ask three out of those eight. There’s a lot more space to play if you know all eight. Knowing that, as you are playing the role of question detective, it can certainly help. We have a free tool we’re going to give your listeners so that they’ll have contacts and then they can go out and do a little detective work. And very quickly, they’re going to see the impact of stronger questions.

Marylou: You’ve mentioned three of eight that we all know or at least that’s the baseline. What are the three that we know and what are the eight that we should know?

Deb: I’ll break it down that way. This is an acronym, the three that all sellers already asked. All sellers should say in selling that is, they [00:10:24] a question. They have data questions, you often do those as you’re qualifying. A data question is a question that simply goes after the fact. It’s not about opinion. It’s not about anything subjective. You just want the facts, the data.

The C and the O are the other two in the acronym of discover. I just skipped the I and S but we’ll come back to them. C and the O in the word discover are the other two that most sellers routinely ask. C, I’m calling it consequence. O, that’s outcome. Outcome is anything that’s about your hopes, dreams, plans, goals, visions of the future, what do you want to have. Consequence is of course the flip side of that. What if you don’t reach those outcomes? What are the risks if you don’t take action, they’re sometimes called pain questions. When we ask data, outcome and consequence questions in sales, we then simply have what we need to create a solution and that it should be sufficient to give us the information that will be compelling to the buyer.

The problem is it doesn’t work so well anymore. It used to work just fine but buyers have caught on and buyers have become empowered. Buyers are wanting more including this experience, this value that’s created. Data, consequence and outcome questions, they do serve a purpose, but they no longer stand alone. They don’t create value because everybody else is doing the same thing.

The other five have more opportunity for you to create value. I’ll continue going out of order just for the interest of time and being able to go quickly. The next one is my favorite, is the value question. We need to ask more value questions. They’re simple, there’s rich information within them. They help you avoid leaving money or opportunity on the table for someone else. Value question is getting the prioritization that the hierarchy of needs from your buyer. Your buyer says, “We need to do X, Y and Z as an outcome.” You might ask what happens if you don’t do X, Y and Z. They’ll give you an answer, “We still need to know out of X, Y and Z, which one matters most and why is that that it matters most?” That’s the need we want a response to, not the one that we might otherwise be counting on because it’s easier, we call it low hanging fruit.

Marylou: Correct, yes.

Deb: That’s a great question. We need that one. Another one that sometimes gets asked but not often enough is the R, that’s a rational question. I want to know the things related to your decision, the decision you’re going to make. What are the criteria, who’s involved, and so on. Sometimes, those flip in as qualifying questions.

I also want to know about decisions that you’ve made in the past. Walk me through your process for how you decided on that vendor? And the reason I want to know that is that the next time that there’s an opportunity, I want to get into your process, I wanna know those steps, I want to get into your head and know how you made those decisions earlier so that I can intercept sooner. We need to get a little bit more fine-tuned on that.

The D and the R, I put those in because I see them about a third of the time from sellers when I’m out field coaching. And then it’s the next three, we have left the I, the S and the E. Those are the ones that virtually no sellers are asking. Here’s the opportunity to immediately differentiate yourself. The E is an example question. It is the equivalent of putting your buyer behind the wheel of a car and asking them to take it for a test drive so that they can begin to experience something about your product. That’s why when you go to buy a car, they put you behind the wheel so that you can never imagine yourself without that car again. We don’t always get to do that because we sell intangibles or we’re working with people over the phone. Instead, we have to ask them a question that gets them living something out, gets them talking about example, gets them imagining the contract between the future state and the current not so great state that they might be in. The more that they can envision that experience, the richer that example can be that they give us, the more and more they do the selling work themselves which I love when that happens. I’m throwing a lot out there, this just feels like a fire hose.

Marylou: No, I’m lovin it. I’m just like a sponge over here.

Deb: Let me talk about the question that’s an easy one in theory and a hard one in practice, because we have a natural resistance to asking it, and that’s the eye. It’s an issue question. This is the only one out of the eight that is about us as sellers. We can ask it in two ways. We can ask it reactively, so they have told us some objection or they have some barriers doing business with us or we screwed up in the past. Whatever it is, it’s already an issue on the table. What many people do is duck and dodge and maybe apologize but we seldom ask a question at this moment to allow people to vent and get it all out there so we can move past it.

Reactive is your question sounds something like, “Oh Marylou, I’m really sorry that happened. Tell me what the implications were because that happened.” You’re going to give it all to me. You’re going to exhaust and expend all of that negativity. It’s no longer going to be a barrier between us. I just listen to you. I created value because we’ve took this bad thing and I allowed you to give part of it back me, so there’s an opportunity there to build some trust.

The question in that moment of crisis, uncomfortable but very powerful. The other way you can use this easier is proactively, but it requires a little humility to do this. Again, the natural resistance occurs but a proactive issue question tries to prevent this from being an issue. It’s about, “Tell me what I can do. I hope we continue working together. I want to make sure that I’m doing business the way you like to do business with sales people. What would you like to see me do?” Or, “Hey, we’ve been doing business together a long time. I want to perform a service check. What would you like to see me doing differently?” All questions that prevent issues, even small niggling ones that are in the back of someone’s mind, just get them out.

And then finally, another very powerful, buyers like this question a lot. They like them all by the way, the least they like is data because it’s boring to them. The last one to talk about is the S, that’s the solution question. A solution question plants seed. It keeps people reacting to alternatives, not that you proposed to them, but that you ask in the form of a question so that you can get a read on potential objections so that you can make them think outside of what they’re already doing.

It usually starts something like, “What are your thoughts about?” Or if you want to make it very narrow and get a close ended answer, “Have you ever considered?” When I put the idea out there, they’re going to have a reaction, I know what that reaction is. They will often say, “Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ve never thought about it that way.” And then you know that you’ve got something germinating. You’ve got the beginnings of an idea and you don’t have to come in cool later on to surprise them or dramatically change something that they have never thought about before. That’s rapid feed, those are the eight.

Marylou: Amazing. My first question that came to mind as I’m listening to this is a lot of folks nowadays are leveraging technology to have conversations within an email engine. Not necessarily having the phone dialogue questioning, but want to learn more about embedding questions within email so that they’ll lean into the computer a little bit, the buyer, then say, “Wow. No one’s ever really asked me that.” Does this work with non-voice communication, as well? Have you experimented with it?

Deb: Email, voice mail, as I mentioned I do a lot of field research. I shadow sellers, I interview buyers. I have first-hand examples. That little tool that I mentioned, there are questions that are used in the first minute of the phone call, but at least six out of the eight, I have to go back and at least six out of the eight have also had email variations that were effective.

Marylou: Interesting. Hear that, people? We try to start working on 68 touches where they’re creating value in our email engine to just help us warm up the chill of accounts and people who are either dormant or we haven’t spoken with for a while or they came inbound to us. We haven’t started the conversation yet. We’re always looking for ways to be able to like you said, get people stimulated, get them excited, get them thinking about what kind of conversation they’re eventually going to have with us when we do reach them on the phone.

Having a tool like this isn’t valuable for those of us who are hyper personalizing our emails, for those of us who are still working through cold emails where we have a list that hasn’t been touched for a while. You kind of want to warm up the chill and see who’s going to bubble up on the top. But adding the value within the email is a way that we’re going to shrink that lag in the pipeline and also have the first conversation be more meaningful. This is great stuff Deb, I love it.

Deb: It’s valuable. It really works and it gets you to a place where you’re more comfortable asking questions. You have to try some things and not be afraid that questions will get negative reactions. They really don’t, not nearly as often as we think they will. You aren’t like the prosecuting and turning with your witness up in the courtroom. Scenarios that are negative about questions are really exaggerated. The positive perceptions, the reactions of buyer far vastly outweigh anything negative that you might be concerned about.

Marylou: Plus, this is grounded in research. For those skeptics out there in the audience, this is based on statistically relevant research of buyers and what they want to see in terms of conversation from us. It’s not like you’re inventing this out of a vacuum, Deb. You have data to support each of these elements and why they’re important to utilize within the sales conversation as we march people down the pipeline. This is great.

Deb: [00:21:38] sales results [00:21:41] as it comes directly from our buyers and we still seldom get an opportunity to have that kind of data.

Marylou: Sponsored by universities, you said as well. You’re going to have a good breadth of audience. Usually, when you think of audiences, you think of maybe all SAAS people, or all tech companies or health care. It sounds like this is a broad spectrum of verticals that you also were able to get information from. That’s great.

Deb: It was [00:22:14] University [00:22:15] panel study and a 530 B2B buyers represent every sector, different age group, demographic sort of every type, complex sales, more transactional sales, all B2B. People who were buying for a lot of years, people who are newer to buying, people who make full buying decision versus those who are working groups. You name it. It’s in there, you can slice and dice a lot of ways.

Marylou: Is that available in for people in our audience, leaders who want to get in the data a little bit more?

Deb: There’s a movement called stop selling and start leading and there is more and more of that becoming available as we continue our analysis. Stay tuned for that on the webpage for stopsellingandstartleading and in webinars and podcasts like this. We’re releasing a little at a time. We’re continuing to do seller side research which I invite your audience to be part of it if they’d like to be. It’s all coming together in various articles, the sales journal, journal of professional sales management is featuring articles soon. There’s a lot of coming out, lots of places where people could go for that.

Marylou: And I’ll be sure to post some of these links on the show notes page so that people can just click on the link to get more information about where Deb is, what she’s doing, what she’s up to. What’s the best way for us to get ahold of you for a one on one or to get more information about the work that you are doing?

Deb: Just email me. I welcome and enjoy talking to people deb.calvert.peoplefirstps.com. PS stands for productivity solutions.

Marylou: Okay, and the book again? The title for everybody to go immediately download from amazon.

Deb: The book is called Discover Questions Get You Connected.

Marylou: Discover Questions Get You Connected. And also, Deb has a BrightTALK channel, the Sales Expert’s Channel. A lot of people are starting to share their expertise there as well. For those of you who want to continue to learn and master in the comfort of your own home and listen when you want, that channel is available, and I’ll put that link in as well.

Deb, thank you so much for your time. This is a wonderful framework that you have and it’s truly something that the folks are listening to this podcast must really adopt because we are only doing those three, maybe four that I counted, out of the eight. If we can sprinkle in the others and start getting in the rhythm with our cadences and sequences and voicemails and emails, boy, life is going to be a lot more fun when we finally get into that conversation with our prospects. Thanks again, Deb, really appreciate your time.

Deb: Thank you Marylou, my pleasure.

Marylou: Good morning everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, I have an extremely fun guest. The reason it’s fun is because Erik Luhrs is known as the Bruce Lee of Revenue Generation. How is that for a title? He’s the world’s only Neuro-Revenue Strategist. Just that combination is a mouthful but it’s also really important to us because he really has that master practitioner status of NLP. I’ll let him talk about NLP and what that’s all about. It’s a very important topic in the work that we do, especially since we’re into persuasion. We’re trying to get people to open their hearts, their doors, their offices to us, to come in and have conversation.

Erik is also the creator of Revenue Mind. He is the bestselling author of Be Do Sale. He’s got a number of other works that I won’t steal all of his thunder, I’ll let him talk about. He works with clients to rapidly scale their revenue by using what he terms as the path of least resistance, Fox Business News, Selling Power. He’s been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, he’s everywhere. Without further ado, I’d like to introduce you all to Erik Luhrs. Erik, welcome to the podcast.

Erik: Thank you, Marylou. Thank you for having me on.

Marylou: Let’s tackle that first title. How the heck did you come to be known as the Bruce Lee of Revenue Generation?

Erik: Well, just like Bruce Lee, it was a progression. I studied martial arts for a couple of decades and Bruce Lee is one of my idols. I really like how he approached martial arts because his entire construct was, “Use what’s useful, discard what’s useless.” He was constantly of all thing.

If you actually researched martial arts history, he went from studying Wing Chun and then he came to America, he studied boxing, he studied wrestling. He changed the names over the course of time of his system over and over again to fit with what he was doing. He was constantly into evolution. I’ve kind of taken that construct to myself in what I do in terms of the business world.

The way that the moniker got, I can say it just happened that way. What actually happened was I used to have an entire wall, filled this wall up with quotes from him, because you’re an avid fan. I was coaching a client, I want to say this is seven some odd years ago maybe. I was coaching a client and really quoting a lot of Bruce’s quotes to him, they were all germane for that day and giving him a new perspective on what going on with his business and helping him change what he was doing. I kept quoting and quoting.

At one point, he just stopped, he said, “You’re like a Bruce Lee of sales.” I heard that, I was like, “Wow.” I said, “That’s awesome.” Then I sat and wrote that down obviously. I sat on that title for a year. I was terrified because I said, “That’s big boy stuff.” You go out there and you say that, you’ve got to have everything to back that up. It was like, “That’s a mental if you’re going to take it on, that’s a big mental to take on.”

After a year, I finally said okay, I got to go. This is me, this is what I do, etcetera. I put that name out there. Instantly, everything started changing. I got to say that was kind of the thing that started opening up the floodgates was people are like, “I got to connect with the Bruce Lee of sales.” “This sounds awesome.” All of a sudden, I started getting attention from everybody.

I was doing guru selling, that was the original thing that I was doing years ago. As I evolved, I started studying lead generation. At some point, I was applying Bruce Lee’s stuff to that. It kind of morphed into the Bruce Lee of sales and lead generation which people knew me for a long time. And then I started studying positioning and I was like, “Okay, now is the Bruce Lee’s of sales and lead generation positioning. Okay, this is getting too big a wall.” What am I going to get in sales coaching and lead generation copywriting.

I said, “Okay, what am I really playing with here? What am I really doing if I chunk up a bit and look at this, what am I really playing with here?” I said, “This is really the revenue generation funnel for the company of generating revenue for them.” That’s where it came from. At the end of the day, it was like, “The Bruce Lee of revenue generation,” because that’s really the entire structure that I play with. Long winded explanation about how my title started as one thing, just like Bruce started as one thing and evolved over time into something else. I kind of find it funny that my title evolved just like Bruce himself did.

Marylou: Well, especially you hit a number of different points and top of funnel which is where my audience lives for the most part. It touches many things. I’ve heard you say copywriting, I heard you say persuasive techniques, I heard you say that you’re doing selling, you’re doing sales [00:06:05]. I mean, it touches so many different skill sets that it’s no wonder you’ve evolved to revenue generation and that is a perfect title because we are responsible for generating revenue for our companies, our businesses for solos out there. I love that connection with the Bruce Lee path to discovery is parallel with yours, that’s awesome.

Erik: He was the man.

Marylou: He was the man. Can we talk right into NLP or do you want us to just slowly get there? I’m really interested in how you’ve applied this. The reason being is because when in my brain, we’re dealing with prospects who run the spectrum from an unaware state to fully aware of our product and services, but we also have to put this element of compelling content and persuasive language into our conversations in order to get people to lean in and say, “Okay, I will take my precious time and give five minutes of it to you.”

How did you get into the NLP side of things? What was that path like and how are you using it now in teaching sales executives to further their conversations so that it can generate more revenue?

Erik: I kind of stumbled into NLP because I was interested in psychology but that came through personal development. Years ago, we’re going back 20 years, I got my first tape set from Tony Robbins. I think everybody back in the mid 90s did.

Marylou: Yes, we all did.

Erik: You look at your bookshelf..

Marylou: Awaken the giant within, right?

Erik: Right, and personal power too. I’m sure they’re sitting up there. The tape version, not the CD version, old school. I got into him and he had studied NLP, obviously I won’t go into his story. He had studied NLP and I started to hear about it from what he was doing and then other people. As I got into personal development myself and then coaching other people etcetera, that was something I was interested in.

I actually started studying from one of my coaches and he was I guess kind of famous in the NLP world with the big guys. John La Valle is one of the big guys in NLP. He’s Richard Bandler’s partner. Richard Bandler and John Grinder were the guys who created NLP. Now, John La Valle is one of Richard’s partners.

My Coach, my trainer had kind of talked him into a corner one day using NLP, at which point John La Valle said, “Look, if you can beat me around using NLP, I teach this stuff and you’ve talked me into the corner.” He basically just gave him, handed him all of his certifications and said, “I’m giving them all to you because you vested me in what is supposed to be my forte.”

My coach, he had no desire to teach NLP but as we worked together, he said, “I’m going to teach it to you and only you but I’m going to teach it different than other people teach it so you can apply it different than other people apply it. Mostly, if you study NLP it’s taught as kind of a behavioral therapy. It was developed basically to help people in place of psychotherapy, etcetera. You can do that, obviously that’s it was created for.

What we did is we tweaked it for sales and for business development, etc. As he was teaching me, we were building my company. He was teaching me and it was integrated. There were guys who do NLP who are the textbook guys. They can spot language pattern or something and do automatic response to things. They’re what’s known as conscious competent, right? They’re the ones who are like, “Oh, he’s using that language better, then my response would be XYZ.” That’s great. I can do that if I have the text book open in front of me. I can be like, “Oh yes, okay I can see that.”

My trainer, he taught me to be unconscious competent because he’s like, “I don’t really care if you’re a nerd who can quote the book verbatim, I just care that you can use this stuff in the real world.” That’s all he wants. He’s like, “I want you to be able to apply this stuff.”

What happens is I’ll go out and I’ll do it but I’m unconscious competent. I’m doing it, I just don’t realize I’m doing it and a lot of times, I just don’t realize I’m doing it. And a lot of times, early on I would say, “I just don’t think I’m getting it, I just don’t think I’m doing it.” He’d be like, “Okay well, I would always record my coaching sessions, let’s play some of your stuff, let me listen to it.” He would be like showing me. “Okay, you’re using this language better than you’re countering them with this.” I’m just like, “Wow, okay.”

Even though I’ve been given the designation of master practitioner, I do it completely unconsciously. Like I said, if you put those textbooks if front of me and I open it up, it’s like, okay, I can teach it. I can walk through the textbook with people. But I’m not the guy who’s on stage teaching this step by step. I’m just the guy who’s like, “I want to be able to do it. I don’t really care about being able to quote it.”

Marylou: Does the knowledge of NLP in your unconscious, conscious state, is that what spawned neuro-revenue or are the two not even related?

Erik: They’re all related. All of the things that I’ve done since learning NLP has spawned from that understanding. I’ve run in a lot of other understandings, I studied quantum physics, law of attraction, not that I go full tangent. I mean, obviously I look at metrics. I do real world and energy world at the same time. I think both are valid.

It has grown from that. At this point, Revenue Mind is what I call the path of least resistance. If we look at how people communicate or if we look at how people try to sell stuff, most of it is done at a conscious level.

Let’s take it from the top. Ultimately, what we’ve got is we want to change somebody’s behavior from not buy to buy. You have a person, you want them to buy, it could be a stick of gum, it could be a $5 million computer system. Whatever it is, you want to switch them from not buy to buy, it’s a behavioral change.

The question is how best to create that behavioral change? Most people use the path of most resistance which is they come to market with something that they say, “Our thing is different. Our product and our service is different.” But it’s not different. They say it’s different because of quality or service or experience which none of these things makes it any different. It’s red instead of blue, or made in America instead of Japan. Meaningless differences.

Automatically, they’re not differentiated from the competition, the market place use them as the same. We’re not making any emotional impact. We’re not changing the feeling of this person from not buy to buy by having a differentiation. What are we going to do?

Well, if our proposition is crap, then we do lead generation. We’re going to go and do our lead generation and we’re going to look at the marketing. What are we going to do? We’re going to look at our competitors, we’re going to look at what they’re doing and we’re going to copy them. We’ll say these guys are making a lot of money or at least we assume they’re making a lot of money so we’re going to copy how they do their messaging, what they say in their messaging, how they approach people in their messaging. We’ve copied our competitors and as they say, “They post, they pay and they pray that this will have an effect.” It really doesn’t.

You have no difference and your messages are meaningless but you still want to create that sale, so now we get down to the level of the sale itself. Now, we have to depend on either having sales people who just hammer and keep contacting or are able to manipulate people into buying things or we have if we’re doing an automated system, we have 20 emails that are just going to keep hitting this person over and over again. It’s kind of like trying to beat the person into submission to say, “Yes.” Even if the person buys, they’re not buying happy. They succumbed to the pressure. Does that makes sense?

Marylou: Totally. You are definitely ringing a lot of bells here.

Erik: Right. That’s why it’s grunt work, it’s a numbers game. You got to follow up, all that hurrah garbage. It’s all about how you get there. If you’re going to try to change that person from not buy to buy, it’s all about how you get there. It’s about using leverage effectively. The thing that stands in the way mostly is the conscious mind of the prospect themselves. Consciously, if you have no differentiation then consciously you’re no different. If your messages sound the same as everybody else, consciously they say, “You’re white noise. You sounds like everybody else.” You just blend in, you’re ignored. Consciously, you come to me and say, “I have this product or service. Here’s the features and benefits. Do you want it? Do you want it now? Do you want it in brown? Do you want it in red?” It’s all conscious push.

But the conscious mind, number one, it’s only 1% of how humans work. Humans function 99% subconsciously. Trying to go act, the conscious mind is a virtual waste of time. When you’re trying to talk conscious and logic to people, the subconscious just shots that stuff right down. It goes this looks the same, this sounds the same, this is the same. The filters just keep putting up wall after wall, that’s why you have to keep pounding and pounding.

If you want a path of least resistance, it’s like, “How do I build a path that has least resistance to me? I got to go around the conscious mind. How do I this?” I look at it at three levels again, positioning, lead generation and then the sales process. If I create a position in the marketplace, if I position my company as being the only one of a kind doing what it does, automatically, it’s differentiated. If I do it and if I make it and I put it everywhere, I want to be that company where people say, “I’ve seen you everywhere. You’re everywhere these days. I don’t know how, but you’re everywhere.” Pure was in pervasive.

If you have this pure less position, already you’re coming from a powerful place as opposed to I’m the same as everybody else, I have no difference. Now, when we’re going to start contacting people, reaching out doing marketing which is a waste of money, I’m going to do lead generation, I’m going to talk to this person, I’m going to try make connections to them as human beings. Instead of trying to say, “Here’s my product or service with these features and benefits,” I’m going to talk to their subconscious.

How is the subconscious communicating with itself about a problem that it wants to solve and I want to get in on that conversation. I want to use those language patterns because when the subconscious starts to hear the way it talks to itself outside of itself, it has no ability to ignore it. It can’t ignore it. Because going, “Wait a minute, only I say that or only I feel that or only I think that, wait a minute. And it has to start paying attention to you. Now all of the sudden it starts paying attention to you and you have this position where you’re one of a kind like, “Wow okay, I’m listening to you. I’m overwhelmed by how amazing you are and how different you are.” We’re really leveraging that communication, that connection, so that by the time we start talking about a sale as opposed to, “Okay, now I’m going to start gearing up to make the pitch and blablablah.” The sale should just basically be a foregone conclusion.

Instead of saying, “Do you want this?” You have the person saying, “I want this, how do I get it? How do I buy this? How do we work together?” It becomes a foregone conclusion simply from the flow of communication. Either you take the path of most resistance, which is how everybody does it, or you take the path of least resistance, you get to the same outcome but one gets you there faster with a lot less expenses because you don’t have to keep posting, paying and praying, and it makes you a lot happier and plus you scale faster and get a lot more good referrals.

Marylou: Okay everybody, I can hear the collective ears like, “How do I do this? What would I do? Where do I sign? What would I do? How do I create these messages that you are talking about?” Tell us a little bit..

Erik: Isn’t it amazing how I do what I do? I guess I’m unconscious competent. I do this, this is me.

Marylou: Well, my troupes, we love technology. We leverage technology. If we can leverage technology in a way that is authentically pleasing to our prospect so that they are clamoring to have a conversation with us to sign, the bottom line, boy life would be great. It wouldn’t stress us out. But where do you begin, Erik? Where do you start to get to even a level,  not even mastery, just kind of conscious of how to do it.

Erik: It all depends on how hardcore you want to go. When I’m going to work with a client, I look at it and, “This is a radical approach and it affects all levels of a company if you do it right.” There’s ways to do bits and pieces of it. You can say, “Well, I’m going to become slightly more effective at my lead generation.” You can, and it will have a certain amount of increase. You’ll say, “Okay, I’m going to actually develop a position for my company.” Because most people don’t ever sit down and say, “What is the positioning of my company?” They just position by default. They say, “We sell this widget.” And that’s it. That’s their positioning.

Positioning is something that, I broken it down into 12 different elements that you can actually apply. You could start all the way from the top, even before positioning is what I call the three W’s, the who, what, why of your company. If you want to go full bookie and get the full leverage of this, you have to start from the beginning, and that beginning is really you and your company. Who are you? What do you sell? Or what you really do? And why do you do it? And then there’s a number of different versions of  the who, what, why questions that I asked. It kind of put people through the ringer for their company.

If you really want to get it from the top down, that’s where you start because if you look at your business as we’re just here to make money, you’re automatically a me too business. There is no business where you say, “Our driving force is to make money, where you have an original anything.” If you went into business to make money, that’s your reason, that’s you mission statement, that’s your purpose, that’s you’re everything. The world is filled with companies whose only mission is to make money, “How much more money can we make?” And that’s fine, but those companies are the ones who are going to spend cash on marketing, etc. because they’re just out there pushing messaging, pushing content creation and white papers or whatever the hell it is that they’re using, videos.

You can just do that, or you can say, “Look, I want to have a business that is fun, that I enjoy and that scales itself because it’s really working outside the conscious mind. It’s not meeting that resistance.” But to do that, first, we have to really know who we are, what we’re doing, and why we’re doing it. Then, if I know that, then creating the position becomes a hell of a lot easier because I’m not just trying to make crap up. It’s flowing form our purpose. And then, if you got a really powerful set of positions, then lead gen becomes even easier because the messaging just basically starts taking care of itself so that by that time again, you’re leveraging onto that individual human being. They’re being overwhelmed by your alignment with your core values of yourself, your business, etc., your position on the market place that makes you one of a kind, your messaging that’s speaking directly to their subconscious needs is also being overwhelmed.

If you want to start, you could just say, “Look, let’s look a little bit at the messaging. Are we talking right now?” If you really wanted to start at the basic level. My messaging is my lead gen or even my sales process. Am I pushing people? Am I hounding people to get a sale? If I’m hounding people to get a sale, that means I’m using the path of most resistance. How can I start drawing people out? You don’t draw people out by showing up at their office door and say, “Got five minutes?” You draw them out by putting something in their hand that makes them say, “This resonates with me. This is interesting to me. This is something I want to pursue.” How are you doing lead gen? Are you drawing people out or you’re pushing people back into their shelf?

Marylou: Well, I think with the onset of technology, we’re all getting lazy and we are doing not necessarily the spray and pray approach, but we are doing the hound, hound, hound, hound, will you buy from me now, will you schedule an appointment with me now, approach, without giving any value as to the why. I also know that there are people listening in on this call who work for larger companies and when you say, “It’s got to start at the top, at the position of the company.” They’re kind of stuck. I mean, they’re in companies that have marketing departments and there’s messages already coming out from there. But is there a way that a business developer sitting in a cubicle in a large company can take some of these principles and apply them to their personalized emails for example, or do you really need the echo system in order to really effect change?

Erik: Well obviously, if it comes from the top down like the top, top down, you’re going to have the greatest effect. You’re going to have an avalanche effect which is beautiful when it happens and that’s when you start getting companies that are growing at 200% to 300% a year.

Let’s just say you’re an individual and you’re trapped. My first thing is make sure it’s the job you want. If you feel like you can’t express yourself fully, maybe you should look for something else. But let’s just say you’re in that situation. At that point, you have to say, “Okay, let me do this for myself then.” I’ve had sales people who changed what they call themselves. They have been a sale representative and they changed their titles to something else because that allowed them to start embedding their mission or their positioning into what they did. Why do you sell what you sell? Because if you sit there and say, “Well, I’m sitting here and I’m selling because I want to make money.” Then guess what? You’re just exactly the same as the company that’s the only purpose is to make money.

Marylou: Right.

Erik: Do you truly love what you sell? Do you think it’s really valuable? If you don’t, then get to square one which is find a job selling something you do really believe in. If you really do believe in it, why do you believe in it? How do you believe that it brings value to people? How do you think people are missing that value? How do you think that you’re not connecting with the needs or the wants, the problems that it solves?

Again, you can put yourself through it, who are you in this company? What are you doing? Why do you do it? Looking at your position, what do you call yourself? “I’m Eastern Regional sales rep for toiletries,” okay. But if you love the toiletries, then, maybe you want to change what you call yourself to James Bond of toiletries. I always get my man, the Canadian Mounty of Toiletries. We always get our rep. We always get you clean. You can play with it as much as you can.

Again, being in a corporation, there’s only so far. Some companies will allow you to play with what you call yourself, some won’t, but you want to say, “How much can I play with my messaging and really talk to the person? How much can I play with my position and really change the perception of who I am at least when I am contacting these people?” You can play, but if you have boundaries, you have to say, “Okay, I’m playing it inside these boundaries.”

And then don’t be afraid to push the boundaries, don’t be afraid to go to corporate. Your boss is boss and say, “Look, I want to use more messaging. I want to change these messages because they’re not as effective as I think it could be.” Very rarely is somebody in the position where they’ll say, “I don’t want to listen to any idea that might make us more money.” I’ve seen it and it’s painful but it’s rare. Most people will at least give you an ear, if you make a valid point. You can do it.

Marylou: Given the fact that we’re entrenched in this are we a fit and making sure that we’re working with the right people, what kinds of companies or people do you work with and how do you go about working with them?

Erik: Good question, thank you. I work with a small amount of companies because when I’m doing this stuff, it’s kind of intensive. I like to work hand in hand with companies. What I’m always looking for first is smaller companies. I’ve worked with huge corporations. I’ve worked with the Microsoft and etc. out there. But smaller companies, mid-size companies, smaller companies, they’re more flexible, they’re more able to change. I’m looking for the people who drive revenue at the executive level, who drive revenue in the company; CEO, CRO, CMO, CSO, because they’re the ones that can affect that sort of avalanche thing going down the company.

I look for people who are daring and bold because, if you get in there, if you say, “Hey look, we really want to escalate revenue. We’re doing 15% a year raw and everything else like that. We’re looking for 100 to 200% increase. We want to really rip the doors off this things.” You’re talking about a whole scale change to the company’s mission, the company’s purpose, the company’s positioning, the company culture and it’s not an easy thing.

Going in and saying, “I’m going to do some new copywriting.” Yeah, that’s simple to get in there but if you’re looking for really creating that path of least resistance, it’s a top down kind of thing. Not too many people are willing to do it and you have to have the resources. If you’re a sole entrepreneur, can you do it? Yes, but you’re not going to be able to make nearly as much change because you’re chief cook and bala washer. But if you have a company that has a marketing department, that has an inside sales department, that has salespeople, that has the resources for a revenue funnel, then you can make a lot of change a lot faster.

Marylou: The other thing to point out is a lot of the folks that listen to this podcast are starting off maybe as a start-up and now they’re trying to move upmarket, move into enterprise based sales where now all of a sudden instead of one stakeholder, one buyer, you’ve got three to five to seven to nine depending on how large a sale and revenue volume you’re looking at.

Given that the strategy you’re talking about is a per persona type of strategy, I can only imagine the amount of work to create messaging and the right messaging for each of the people sitting around the table in their relative position in the pipeline. Because top of funnel people that we see to get into meetings and to do demos or having those first conversations may not be the same people who are actually affected by the close.

This system of yours, how do these books, the Revenue Mind, the GURUS selling system, Be Do It Sale, are those good starting points for someone who is really loving what they’re hearing today but can’t necessarily change the world overnight? But as you mentioned before, it’s important to be able to create a compelling reason why you want to change your title or why you think the messaging should change. How do we get to that point where we are confident in our argument that things have to change in order for us to get the revenue we’re looking for?

Erik: Well, there’s kind of two questions in there. How do we change ourselves or how do we set up to sell to a group buying?

Marylou: Both. I think it’s kind of first and foremost, I love this idea. I’m sitting here as a sales exec, I love this idea. I’ve got to convince my management. We should try to go down this path, but I think I need to get smarter first. Where do I begin?

Erik: Okay, certainly Be Do Sale, you could pick it up, it’s available on Amazon. It was born out of GURUS Selling which was the first step as I told you about, I started with GURUS Selling about nine years ago. It’s certainly a good first step and it has a flavor of what I was talking about today. But if you’re looking for a wholesale understanding, I always say I’m willing to talk to virtually anybody. You can certainly reach out to me. You can go to the website which is revenuemind.com or you can look me up at LinkedIn. I’m pretty much the only Erik Luhrs on LinkedIn, or just google Bruce Lee revenue generation I think, search that on LinkedIn, that will pop up too. Contacting me or checking out the website is probably the easiest way to get on board with the whole of what I was talking about today.

Marylou: It’s just amazing when you think about, I mean, probably all of us on this phone call right now, except for you Erik, are in that camp of path of most resistance and we’ve got lazier as technology has gotten better. We hide behind the hammering effect. I’m not saying all of us do that, and I’m really trying to get us to rise above that.

But boy, people hate the term USP, Unique Selling Proposition. They don’t know how to do it, they don’t understand it, they don’t see why it’s necessary. I mean I’ve had people write to me because in my book, I ask them to do a SWOT analysis that does six factors SWOT. It’s not nearly a comprehensive of what you shared with us about your positioning statement and I get pushed back on that all the time. All the time.

What I’m hearing loud and clear is that we have to know why we matter and have to be able to articulate that subconsciously to our buyers. That’s a very tall order but you’ve obviously accomplished that with clients. Tell us a couple of success stories if you have time like, who have you worked with? You don’t have to name names but where they were when they met you and then what happened after they started deploying some of your methodology?

Erik: Sure. It’s usually deployed in bits in pieces. One of my favorite stories is a software from a specialized software firm. Their software is built on the back of some IBM structured software systems. Very specific, very niche and in the industry, not sexy, right? Basically, what the software does is it helps to secure and handle high volume transactions like bank transactions or airline ticket purchases, a lot of back and forth and everything else like that.

When I started working with them, they said, “Okay, we pretty much get all of our business or the vast majority of our business by going to this IBM trade show that IBM has every year and we go there and we talk with potential prospects and everything else like that. We have been going for years. When we go, we get a lot of people come and fill up the fish bowl trying to win whatever we’re giving away. And then, we make the phone calls and nobody even remembers us, let alone what we do. Did I win my iPad? No. Then I have no further need for you.

Marylou: This is sounding familiar, it’s scary.

Erik: They were like, “What can we do to increase and also, our sales cycle is taking 36 months here or even longer.” I sat and said, “Okay, tell me about this trade show that you’ve been going to for years,” and they explain. I said, “Do you have pictures?” “Yes, we took pictures the last couples of years.” He showed me pictures and I said, “Okay, everything’s white.”

Their signage in the back is usually white with either blue or red lettering, they have the company name, and then they have the list of features, benefits, four or five bullet points of why our software is great and wonderful, what it does. They said, “How many rows are these?” “Three or four.” I said, “200 booths all the same color, all basically the same signage.” “Yeah, yeah.”

What’s happening is all the people in that trade show floor, when they walk in the floor, they’re going into a trance. When you look at the same color everywhere, the same shapes, the same colors, the same everything, it puts you in some unconscious state. You’re moving and so it’s passing by you and you’re going into a trance. You didn’t even realize you’re going into a trance. The only thing that stops you is you’ll see a thing for an iPad, a contest for an iPad. You get used to pulling out the business card.

They’re not even looking at the solutions, they’re not even looking at what your thing does or anything. Subconsciously, their brains are like, “I can’t even handle it.” Don’t look up, just look down at the table and see what you can get as a freebie. That sucks because they’re trained now to look down, to not even look at the solution. I said, “Okay. First thing we have to do is to break the trance. Your booth is going to be black. You’re going to be the missing tooth.

Marylou: I love it.

Erik: They were like, “Huh?” Instead of putting up a list of four or five bullet points of the features or benefits that your software supplies, I said, “I want to talk to the subconscious mind instead.”

What are the biggest pitches and complaints that you hear from your prospect? How would they describe their problem? What we ended up having was signage on the back was two different sides. A man’s head on one side and a women’s on the other, and then a couple of different word bubbles coming out of the heads. One of them was like, “Who is the F squiggly line after this dah dah dah dah genius who decided we should use three softwares instead of one?” “Who’s the blankety blank that decided that we should do this?” “How am I supposed to blankety blank do this when I only have this much time?”

Actual thoughts. The actual complaints that their prospects had. Not only the features and benefits but the pains, the concerns, the things they say to themselves. They don’t give a crap about your solution, they can’t even see your solution until they realize what it’s a solution to. I did that and I said, “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to get less people walking in and no contest this year. You’re going to get less people walking in because they’re going to be scared. They’re going to be because they’re white, white, white, black. They’re going to get a lot more people looking but a lot less people walking in.

Marylou: A lot of looky loos, yes.

Erik: A lot of looky loos but less people walking in. The people who do walk in are going to be a lot more qualified. Because now, they’re going to understand what the hell you’re working on. They go, they have it, course, what happens? Less people walking in but the validity of the prospects increased 50%.

Marylou: Wow.

Erik: They were telling me, I was talking with one of them, she took me out for lunch about a month ago, one of the main head salesperson. She was like, “Yes, now all of a sudden, these things are closing after 18 months as opposed to 36 simply because we [00:42:30] the process of getting on the same page. That’s just one application of lead gen in one environment, kind of stuff we’re talking about.

Marylou: That’s awesome. I appreciate you coming on the podcast today. I want to make sure everyone knows that I will be putting all your contact information into the show notes area. Again, Erik has how many books out there now?

Erik: Right now for books, the only actual books is the Be Do Sale. I am working on one for Revenue Mind, but don’t anybody hold your breath just yet because I am kind of busy.

Marylou: But he did say that he is happy talk to any of you who really think that what you heard today is something that will add a lot of value to your company. And it is now, we all know this, it’s all about the white noise out there and how do we get through. We’re constantly looking for ways to be able to communicate with our prospects in a way that they notice us. Erik has the key to that. I hope that you all visit his site, study what he is doing, reach out to him and then from there, the sky’s the limit it sounds like by how much revenue you guys can bring into your company. Erik, thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Erik: Thank you Marylou.

Marylou: Happy Tuesday everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have a guest who, in her own words says that she has fallen into this part of the pipeline that we all love, top of funnel, but she has done a tremendous job so far. I wanted to introduce her to you because she has some really great information that you’re all going to benefit from, listening to this podcast today. I have with me Patty Laushman. She is the founder of Revenue Catapult out of Colorado.

I actually met her in a funny way. I got an email from someone, that was a cold email, and I love getting cold email so continue to send them to me everybody, but as I was reading through this email I noticed that it seemed like it was a little bit older Predictable Revenue email. I wrote back to them saying, “Hey, this looks like a Predictable Revenue email.” They actually forward the email onto Patty and that’s how we met. I got on the phone with her and I was just intrigued by how she learned about or how she deployed this type of system. Had she read Predictable Revenue? I invited her to talk to us and wow, you guys, interesting stories. Patty, tell us, what got you interested in top of funnel Predictable Revenue type of systems?

Patty: Great. Hi Marylou, thank you so much for having me on your show today. As a fan of the podcast, it’s really an honor to be here talking with you about the stuff. I think my story is kind of funny because I really, probably never should have ended up in this line of work. I had started a tech company back in 2003 and grew it for nine years. I sold that company in 2012.  I had a four year old boy at home at that time and was trying to figure out what my next gig was going to be, trying to reinvent myself. I really thought who’s going to hire a former business owner. I had a lot of different skills but had never gone very deep on most of them. It wasn’t like I could go out and get a job in one of the areas that I managed for my business.

I got very, very lucky. I connected with an enterprise software company that was based in Sydney, Australia. They were trying to start an office at their North American presence about 15 minutes from my house. I connected with them and did a bunch of recruiting for them. They were just looking for someone in the local area who had a professional network to draw from and that was me. Over a couple of years, I helped them hire a bunch of people.

One day, I was in the office and the CEO pulled me aside and said, “Hey, what do you think about trying your hand at this outbound prospecting stuff?” I was like, “What are you talking about? What does that mean? I’m familiar with inside sales. I’m familiar with outside sales. I’ve never heard of this before. Tell me more.” He said, “Just go get this book called Predictable Revenue and read the first three chapter then come back and talk to me.” I was getting ready to go on a vacation. I got the book and I read it then I read it again. Then I thought, “Okay, sounds like sales and I’m not really interested in sales but there are some things around it that are really interesting for me. Specifically, I like the idea of using technology to solve a business problem which I saw using email to warm up these cold leads is a really interesting concept.”

I came back, sat down and talked with him and I said, “Well, I’ve read the book twice. It sounds kind of interesting.” He was like, “Okay, go.” I was like, “Alright, I’m going to need a little help. I have basically and email address, a LinkedIn account, and access to personnel at the company. That was about all I had to start with. I had a database of context in their salesforce account. Had some context, talked to people about the product then try to understand what the pain points were, of the people that they were going to be expecting me to reach out to. Honestly, I thought I’d give it about three weeks and then I would go back to that CEO and say, “I tried it. This is just not for me.” I really expected that to be my experience. I had no other consulting gigs going on at the time.

I have to tell you, by the end of the first week, when these senior bank executives were agreeing with me because I had something in email, I found that absolutely intoxicating. I’m sitting here in my little home office sending off these emails and these very important people in this organizations are willing to give up to me their most resource at work, which is their time. It really took off from there. Whenever there’s great success in business, I think there’s always a combination of smart decisions and a little bit of luck.

I brought a lot of experience with me into the role and so, I can take credit for that, but what was really lucky for me in that situation is this company had a product that solved the problem that literally, every bank in the world was trying to solve at that time. They could solve it very elegantly. I was able to craft really compelling messages demonstrating how they had solved these problems for other people like you, as I’m approaching these bankers. It was great. Once I proved that the model work, they are willing to put more money into tools like email automation and access to information about the companies I was targeting. It was amazing. It totally took off. Over about 20 months of part time effort, I dropped about $30 million in sales opportunities into the top of their sales funnel. That’s my story.

Marylou: That’s your story. Listeners are thinking, is this a one hit wonder, but it isn’t, right Patty? Continue. Tell us more.

Patty: While I was doing this work for them, I had the same question. I was like, “Will this work for other companies?” I put my fillers out there. I have a really good professional network in the area. I put my fillers out there. I found a couple of other companies that were willing to give me a shot. Rather than doing the work for them hands on, which I had this exclusive agreement with this one client, I was going out and talking to other CEO and saying, “Hey, I’m doing these amazing things for this company. I wonder if it would work for you.”

I found some companies where they had somebody on staff that they wanted to do this type of work. I focused on training them in how to put their own system in place. I would help them basically correct the code, create a formula from that code which is basically the messaging and then they cadence and installing some email automation that integrates with their existing CRMs. I was teaching other people how to do this. Every client that I took on in the beginning was having similarly awesome successes. I was like, “Wow. This is really cool.” I think this is really important. When I had that tech company for nine years, this was a problem I never solved for myself. Not for lack of trying. I just never figured out how to predictably fill my sales funnel. I knew how valuable this was, being able to add this function to your business.

Marylou: That’s awesome. You mentioned earlier that what you figured out was that you needed to craft compelling messages. When we hear that term in sales, it’s a little frightening because salespeople are not sure that they know how to write compelling messages.

Patty: Sure.

Marylou: Is there a secret sauce, Patty?

Patty: Wow. I wish I could say that there is one, easy formula and I’ll sell it to you for $10,000. I could really, really rich that way. I think there is a lot of fundamental truths and so I’m going to risk being a little bit general here but I’ll try to sprinkle it with specific examples.

Marylou: Perfect.

Patty: Some of the things I look for when I’m going to take on a client is I want to know that they are willing to focus on a niche because having a niche that they market to does a lot of really good things for them. In addition to being a really profitable way to grow your business because you’re doing the same kind of thing over and over and you can become better and better and better at it, rather than doing something different every time you bring on a new client, it enables you to demonstrate to that market that you understand your industry and understand their pain points.

When I had my tech company, it’s a great example, every small business owner or medium size business owner that I talked to thought their business was different. I knew, from my perspective, that if you were a good client for me, you had somewhere between 8 employees and 50 because I knew that your computer networking, this were complex enough to need someone like my staff but you weren’t big enough to hire your own person to put on staff full time. It didn’t matter which industry you were in, all that matter to me was how many employees you had because that told me whether you are a good fit for me or not. They wanted to know that we understood their industry.

If you are focused on a niche, and you’re targeting all bankers who are trying to solve the problem of acquiring customers digitally, you can craft a compelling message there. As long as, this is the other part of it,the market actually wants to solve that problem.

Another example is one of the things hospitals are really looking at now is the patient experience. If you can craft a message to a certain type of hospital executive around the patient experience, you can typically get their attention and get them interested, willing to give up some time to hear what you have to say. Being able to focused on a niche and then making sure that that niche is actually trying to solve that problem. I’m always, always on the lookout or I’m cautious of the companies that are trying to sell ice cubes to Eskimos. You have to be solving a problem that people actually want to solve. It doesn’t matter how good your messaging is if your market doesn’t care.

An example of that would be, I was working for a company that did web development but had kind of expanded into more of a strategic marketing consultancy. When I first talked with them, they knew one of my other clients who was having really great success and so the CEO wanted to bring me in to train as VP of BizDev. I said, “I’m looking at your website and you guys are really going to have to focus on a niche.”

I worked with the VP of BizDev and found that they had this great program they had developed for independent optometrist. These are people who went to school to become an eye doctor, but now, they’re competing against Wal-Mart Optical, Target Optical, JCPenney Optical, for patients. This company put together this great marketing program for an independent optometrist. They said, “Bingo. Let’s see if we can do more of this.”

I worked with the VP of BizDev. We put together a list of independent optometrist. We started our campaign and then the CEO caught wind of it, he goes, “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want to do that. I’m not comfortable trying to acquire companies outside of Colorado. We need to stick with companies in Colorado.” I said, “Well, there’s not enough independent optometrist to really make a good goal of this. If you want fast growth, you need a precisable market.” He said, “Well, why can’t you just write better templates for our web design business?” I was like, “Probably because there’s a thousand other competitors with the same message.” If you just develop websites for people in the local area, there’s a thousand other competitors out there. I can’t write you a compelling story if you don’t have a compelling story. If that makes sense.

Marylou: Yeah, there is this concept of unique connection point that we need to have in our messaging. It just has to be there.

Patty: Right. I have some templates, some frameworks that I worked from when I am developing a sequence of templates for a client. Some of the things I try to highlight are the concept of benefits versus features. From my perspective as a writer, features are fine, features are important information about your product but features don’t compel people to give up their time and have a conversation with you. It’s the benefit’s they’re going to achieve by using those features that will get people to give up their time. Sending an email with a list of features isn’t a compelling message, it’s not a compelling story. But talking about how other people likes you, when I say you, I mean the prospect that you’re targeting, your ideal buyer. When you’re sending a message to that person and you’re demonstrating the benefits others like you have achieved by using my company’s product or service. That is compelling.

Marylou: Do you also look at the personas themselves? One of the things that I am a fan of is getting out of this general messaging process. Not only what you said before about niche but also, segmenting the emails by persona or by buyer. Did you also see that that works really well?

Patty: I do because what a CFO is going to care about is going to differ from what the head of IT is going to care about, which will differ slightly from what the head of retail bank sales is going to care about. The more you can tailor your message to the person who’s receiving it and what they care about, obviously, the higher your response rates, the higher your success rates. Absolutely doing that as much as possible.

                    There’s  a of tools out there today that, like you do that pretty easily where you can import prospects, assign a persona and based on that persona, put them in a particular sequence of messaging based on that persona.

Marylou: Some of the folks that are listening on the call, we’ll have the same question about the actual email engine itself. You’ve been successful in a variety of ways but can you talk us through one of the sequences where email was indeed the champion and the phone may or may not have been a part of the sequence. Also, took to us about when the phone, if necessary, is used to help get those first meetings or at least the raising of the hand.

Patty: Sure. The first client that I develop the system for and was given this amazing opportunity to try my hand at something that I hadn’t done before, they were, again, very fortunate they had the right product at the right time. It had identified a market that really was hungry for this kind of solution. In that case, it took very few phone calls to get people to the phone.

In fact, a lot of times when we did those introductory sales calls, we meaning me, the senior sales executive, and then the prospect. The prospect would communicate, “Oh, Patty called me. We had this conversation about… Patty talked about this. I want to know more about x, y, z.” And then, we’d get off the phone and the senior sales executive would be like, “Did you have all these phone calls with them?” I was like, “No, that was all done through email and literally the first time I have talked with the person was when I was introducing them to you.”

There was this perception by the prospects that we’ve had this long, ongoing relationship.

Marylou: How wonderful is that.

Patty: All these were done through email. It was fantastic.

Marylou: That is fabulous.

Patty: What was even more fun is that I was targeting companies, banks, and credit unions, both in the UK and Australia, and one of my highest compliments came one day when we had talked to this banker in Australia, it didn’t quite qualify as an opportunity. It was still in my hands. I always knew, from Denver, if I sending emails around 2:00pm or 3:00pm, they’ll come into their inbox around 7:00am, 8:00am, 9:00am. I reached out to this guy that we had had a meeting or two with already, over the phone. I was like, “Hey, aren’t you ready for a demo? Can I help you arrange a demo?” He said, “Yeah Patty, come out next week. Let’s set this up for Wednesday.” I said, “Actually, I’m going to hand you off to my colleague in Australia. I’m actually located in Denver.” He had no idea.

Marylou: Where you were?

Patty: I was located in Denver. It was perfect. Anyway. Where I see the phone and sometimes using critical is when the market size is limited and every single contact that you have is very, very, very valuable. That is where I recommend clients spend more time on the phone because you want to make the most of every single prospect that you can dig up, who matches you ideal, by your persona.

                    Here’s another way that I like to use the phone or recommend my clients use the phone. The email automation tool out there… I have a preference for outreach.io. that’s the one that I use with my clients but they have the ability who is most engage in the messaging by how many times they’re opening the email. You can set a threshold for like, if somebody opens the email five or more times, create a task to follow up via phone call.

                    I was working with one of my clients last week. They’re using it a little bit differently. They’re using this tool reach out to candidates that they might place in jobs with client companies. I’m working with the COO and he said to me, “We don’t have phone numbers for the candidates. We have their emails but we don’t have phone numbers. I said, “Well, I think it’s really valuable for you to reach out  to the people who are most engaged with your messaging. How could we use this?” We came up with this great idea. Actually, I think it was the client who came up with the idea. Anyone who opens the email eight or more times, we’re going to create a task for that person or web to do a social task. Either reach out to them on LinkedIn or reach out to them on Twitter. I was like, “Perfect.”

There’s different ways to do that. Those are obviously more time consuming touches but  if you are able to identify which of a body of prospects are most valuable to you, then it’s actually worth that extra time to make the phone or in the case of this other client, I’m working with doing the social touch to deepen the engagement with those people.

Marylou: But as you said, it’s leveraging the technology. using the email engine to warm up that chill. And for those of you listening who are working account based sales where you have your core accounts that your top 20, whatever you want to call them, that you’re assigned or you want to penetrate and you want to close, then blending the phone in, blending social, using LinkedIn intelligently, those are always that will help once you get on that phone call. But as Patty is saying, the emails can be written in a way where the clients think they had conversation with you. That’s where we need to get with our emails.

                    I still see, and we all do, emails that come in that the email is telling you to figure out how you fit. That’s just like you wanted to leave that email. That’s just horrible. It doesn’t have to be like that. Patty is perfect example of who takes the time, tries to find those nuggets of differentiation of where you fit, why people should change, why now and why you. She’s cracked that code. And again, correct me if I’m wrong, Patty. You probably won’t take clients on where you can’t find essentially that compelling argument.

Patty: Absolutely. Figured that it doesn’t do any good for my reputation to take on clients that I know in advance aren’t going to be successful at this. I try to ask enough questions upfront that I can identify pretty clearly who can benefit from the system and are they committed to putting this in place. Are they right for fast growth even? Sometimes people think they want to grow fast but their backend, like their service delivery team is not ready for that kind of growth. I’m trying to look at the whole system and see is this company ready? Are they committed? And do they have that compelling story to tell? Do they have a product or service that a hungry is looking for and willing to have a conversation about? Even if they don’t know it exist, is there a pain point out there that this company very elegantly needs and if they do, getting sales meetings is pretty darn fast.

Marylou: Getting that chill warmed up and ready to go. I think a lot of times, what companies forget to do is to look outside that box and find those compelling reasons to either move into different markets, to go up market. Whatever it is, you’ve got to be able to go there and it had to be, in addition to what Patty was saying. The return on investment of putting an actual SDR team in place that the revenue has to be there. The tear that you’re working on the account have to justify the body because you will need to use phone at some point. Even with all the magic that Patty puts in, you still have to, at some point, pick up that phone.

Patty: Definitely.

Marylou: Patty, how do people get a hold of you? I’m sure they are burning to figure out how to reach out to you now. What’s the best way for my audience to reach you?

Patty: I love LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn everyday, all day. It’s Patty Laushman. And then I also have a company website that has a contact me form and it’s simply revenuecatapult.com.

Marylou: I’ll be sure to put those links in the show notes. As well that this will be transcribed to those of you who are driving and listening to this and want to grab some of those nuggets, they’ll be in the show notes on Patty’s page. That way you guys can reach out to her and start working on getting these compelling emails crafted. The email engine is a fabulous engine but if you put crap in it, you’re going to get crapped out of it. With Patty’s work and things like that, you’re creating a story, you’re creating a compelling reason for people to want to pick up the phone, to call you. I absolutely love her story about a prospect thinking that they actually had a phone conversation. That’s how conversational the emails are. That’s how they should be. Patty, thank you so much for your time. We really enjoyed talking with you and I wish you the best and for everybody who’s listening. Make sure you reach out to her.

Patty: Thank you Marylou.