In an environment where many, if not most, businesses are suffering, how does a company grow by 300% during a pandemic? Today’s guest made it happen, and he wrote a book about it. Listen in to today’s episode to hear Marylou interview Brandon Bornancin, the entrepreneur who founded Seamless.AI and the author of the soon-to-be-released book Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life. Listen in to hear Brandon discuss what happened to prompt him to write his book, how his company grew during the pandemic, and why it’s important to go all out for success. 

Episode Highlights:

• Brandon’s book
• What happened to Brandon that resulted in him writing his book
• What Brandon’s company did to grow 300% in a pandemic
• The daily and weekly rhythms Brandon’s company used to enact their pandemic plan
• The okay-hour system
• Going all out for success

Resources:

Brandon Bornancin

Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life

Transcript

Marylou: Everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today’s guest—I believe I’ve had him on the show already or I talked on his show, I can’t remember. Brandon Bornancin is an expert in this whole concept of growth. Growth can mean different things for different people, but he has taken something from nothing to greatness. Now, he’s working on taking something that’s great to even better and greater.

I wanted him to come to the show because he has a lot of life in him. He told me his birthday is tomorrow. He’s turning 35. He’s on the young side for some of us, but he’s been doing the types of things that some people don’t even accomplish or get to even witness in their lifetime. I wanted him to come on and talk about a couple of things.

One, his company and how that has transitioned through what we’re going through right now—a pandemic, and it’s affected a lot of people, plus or minus. In his world, it has blossomed. His company has grown quite a bit. I want him to discuss how he’s been able to transform his business in light of the pandemic. 

That experience has also motivated him to write a new book. The book is called Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life. This book at the recording of this podcast is available via pre-order. In case you guys want to run out and get it right now, it’s not there, but you can go to Amazon and click on pre-order. I’m sure he’s going to have some great things for you in terms of bonuses and things like that, but I wanted to get him on the show. Brandon, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s nice to finally connect. It’s been a while.

Brandon: Thank you, Marylou Tyler for taking the time to have me on the show. It was awesome to have you in my latest book, Sales Secrets, which hit the number one bestseller last week. It was awesome. Your interview was amazing on Predictable Prospecting. Thanks so much for being here. I’m excited to share a little bit about my new book, Whatever It Takes.

Marylou: As we were talking the pre-talk (I call it), we were sharing the fact that this book was birthed out of your folks, your team saying we need to share this with the world. What happened to you over the last year that culminated in this book being written in as little as to what? You said 22 days?

Brandon: Yeah, it was 22 days. I remember like it was yesterday. My COO and I were sitting at a table and we’re watching the news. What’s going on, the governor’s coming on. This is early March. I live in Columbus, Ohio, and I’m eating and talking with my COO, and it’s 8:00 PM, 9:00 PM, 10:00 PM. We’re on the phone, hitting the buttons, and calling our investors. 

Our investors are calling us, hey guys, what’s the game plan? How are you going to survive? What are we going to do if the country shuts down? How are you going to make it? Employees are calling us, what do we do? People are projecting that the country is going to shut down, offices are going to shut down. Are our jobs secure? Is our livelihood secure? Are you going to do layoffs? Are we going to open the office? Are we going to close the office?

We were sitting at the dinner table just working until midnight, Danielle and I. That evening, the governor of Ohio came on. By the way, the week before, we were in the middle of signing a 25,000 ft² beautiful, brand new, amazing office space. We’re in the middle of this office space negotiation, investors are calling, customers are calling, our employees are calling, and we’re tied to the news trying to figure out what is going on with this thing called COVID and the pandemic.

The governor comes on, shuts down the whole state. Complete lockdown, shut down, everyone’s freaking out. The news is freaking out. The press is freaking out. Employees are freaking out. Our customers are freaking out. Investors are freaking out. My management team and I, luckily, built a few different companies in our past since we were 18, and my father built the first billion-dollar B2B software company in the US. We just do whatever it takes to be successful. 

Throughout all this chaos, I’m like, I have to write down all the beliefs, the mindsets, the habits, the strategies that we have to leverage as a company to survive and thrive in what I’m projecting to be a 24-month challenge in this country. It inspired me to write out how to prepare for a pandemic or crisis. The mindset you need to overcome the crisis and be successful, the habits you need, and the secrets you need to leverage. I wrote it all out, took me about 22 days, and it ended up being 300 pages—just every morning.

By the way, the country shuts down. Now I’ve got more time. I’m not going to the gym, I have to work out at home. I would just wake up at 4:00 AM, write for three hours, then work out in my garage, and then get to work. I didn’t realize how much I was able to write and knockout, but I really wrote this book, Whatever It Takes, to highlight everything that you need to transform your business, relationships, and life to be successful no matter what condition. Good or bad, crisis-no crisis, failure-success, rich or poor—you name it. Everything in this book highlights that.

We use this book internally at our company called Seamless.AI, and we used it to grow 300% this year. Investors are like, what the hell are you doing? This is magical. We went from 20 employees to 125 employees, and we’re trying to scale to 500 employees. My team was like, Brandon, this changed our lives, this helped us grow, this made the impossible possible, you should share it with the world. Now I have already wrapped up two of my books—Seven Figure Social Selling and Sales Secrets—I was like, yeah, let’s do it. It’s on Amazon now for pre-order, and it’s coming out on January 5th.

Marylou: You mentioned a couple of things that I want to highlight for the audience. One is you grew 300% in a pandemic when most companies—mine included—all of a sudden, a channel of conversation was taken from us. What I’m talking about is the telephone because we did not have direct dial information. We had brick-and-mortar numbers inside of our database. Overnight, we lost a viable channel for us to generate opportunities.

When this was all happening, where did you pivot? Did you have to pivot in your approach? I’m assuming this 300% growth is primarily market share, net new logos, and not necessarily the base or expansion. How did you get your arms around that piece of it? Was it something where you had to end up pivoting in some of the ways that you sold?

Brandon: The foundation of it all was really around first preparation and mindset for our team, for our company. If you’ve got the right preparation, expectations, mindset, belief systems, you can do anything in this world. You can accomplish anything regardless of the challenge, life-or-death situations even. 

I launched my first company at 18 that did $12 million in sales, and a lot of the habits that I highlight in this book, I learned from doing that. And then I launched a second company during the financial crisis of 2007, 2008, 2009. I got my ass kicked, the company went out of business. I learned everything that I did wrong from there, then sold, and went from $0 to $100 million in sales for IBM and Google, and then building Seamless.

I just learned all of these core values, these beliefs, these habits, these secrets, all about preparation, all about mindset. The preparation, the first core value is doing whatever it takes. The next secret of preparation is breaking your bullshit belief patterns. Literally, the chapter is titled Break Bullshit Beliefs on both internally and externally, and then the mindset is all about defining your destiny, going all out, and never quitting.

The habits are all about doing what the top 1% do—find solutions, take ownership. Then the secrets—doing the right thing, protecting your dream, and taking massive action. Also, luckily, I had a product—like you had mentioned, Marylou—Seamless finds everyone’s cell phones and emails from around the globe. When everyone went remote, our product was definitely an increase in demand. Although I would argue no matter what, you should be trying to call people on their cell phones, emails, and phone numbers—you name it. If you could get a one-to-one direct versus going the corporate company phone route, it’s always the fastest route to go.

But when everyone went remote, we saw a 2% increase in growth rate from changing nothing. That’s a month over month growth rate. The month over month increased by 2%, you’ve got compounding interest, but 24% increase. If you try to […] out and just multiply it by 12. And then if you apply everything that I teach in this book, Whatever It Takes, you just saw us growing 10%, 20%, 30% a month, and it increased our growth rate. We increased revenue results by 300%.

Marylou: What really strikes me are two things. One is that you have a process for mindset and habit, which I love that idea, but the next thing is you have a team who bought into this and executed the plan. What is it about the team at Seamless that you were able to do this, given all the uncertainty? It’s been very stressful for everyone worried about their livelihood, the future. How did you get them to, all right, people, let’s gather and start working on the plan? What were some of the daily rhythms or weekly rhythms that you deployed in order to act out your plan?

Brandon: Great question. It’s a really good question. Right away, we had an emergency company-wide meeting. No disrespect, massive companies, super successful—when I sold for IBM, if anything was going wrong, it was hidden from you for months or years and then […] would hit the fan—layoffs, whatever. Selling for Google was a little bit different. It was high transparency. When things change or problems come up, they talked about it a lot very quickly. The exact opposite of what I experienced at IBM.

When I launched Seamless, I tried to take all the great things about IBM, all the great things about what I learned from selling for Google, try to remove all the bad things from both of those, try to remove all the bad things, the mindset, and beliefs from running my own startups to build this once in a lifetime culture. Our whole team embodied our core values which are highlighted in this book. But the first thing we did, a big core value is just taking massive action, and we knew that right away, things were going to get worse.

I had this emergency one-hour meeting, and I had four hourly emergency meetings with our company and with all of our users. I’ve got 120,000 salespeople, marketers, and entrepreneurs on Seamless. I did this whole pandemic recession master class for our company, for our users to tell them like, look, it will take 300%-500% more activity, more energy, more money, more time, more failure to produce the exact same results that you were generating in January and February. 

Guess what? It will suck, it will be painful, it will be […], but right now, what we need to do is embrace the pain, embrace the suck, embrace the […] of this situation, and rise up above it because if we don’t, guess what? The company could go under, we could all lose our jobs, our customers could lose their jobs, could lose their success—you name it. We have no option. 

Is this all-in, all-out? Here’s the reality, no one is going to tell you this reality. And we just spoke the hard truths of what we’re going to experience. The governor shut down Ohio, the next day we’re having an emergency meeting. This is how bad it’s going to get. No one’s going to tell you it’s going to get this bad. This is going to be a 24-month thing. It’s going to take us 300%-500% more work. You don’t get paid more. We’re all going to have to put in 300%-500% more work and pray that all of that hard work will create security, success, and results so that no one loses their job, we don’t have to do anything—you name it.

That was one of the core values—projecting the right way—because forecasting it’ll be the exact same work that it was before the pandemic. After the pandemic, you’re going to drastically underestimate the amount of work, effort, time, money, capital, resources, energy, and failure that you’re going to experience. That was the big mindset shift we had everyone bought in on. We had to buy everyone in to go all-out, to never quit, to find solutions, not problems. The whole world is going to be talking about problems 24/7. Don’t listen to negative people. Don’t look for problems. Don’t try to search for problems, find solutions. Take ownership of your domain, protect your dream, protect your dream, take action, do the right thing—you name it.

With these four emergency meetings, highlighting everything that I highlight in the book—each chapter, the whole team came around. We had zero layoffs, zero salary cuts. We gave out probably 50 promotions. We grew the employee base by 5X-6X, we won LinkedIn Top 50 Startups. We won the number one Best Places to Work. I say these things not to stroke my ego. I don’t give a […] about my ego. I say it because if you buy into the habits, the beliefs that can transform your life, your business, and your relationships, and you use them, and you apply them, you will be able to survive and thrive. 

Marylou: Plus you left open though for the folks that may struggle and take two steps forward, one step back, which does happen. You gave them permission to voice their concerns, and that is another issue that I see a lot of is they fester over time—if we’re not addressing right or wrong, fiction or fact—what’s going on in that head of yours, and how can we help turn that around.

The team approach to improvement, knowing that there’s going to be some areas that we’re going to fall down on, and I can share with the team here with our listeners, we had the same issue. But what it gave us was the opportunity to think outside the box a little bit. We were cut off at the knees with a channel that was giving us a 40% response rate, and we went down to zero in one night. Our team looked at this as, all right, pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and figure out another way to do this. It was breathtaking how everyone took on this extra opportunity (we called it), and figured out how we can leverage the other channels of communication to get to our goal. 

Brandon: Yeah, 100%. We also did different things too that helps. We did immediate daily standups. We took the whole company remote in 24 hours. Luckily, I launched the company with my management team and I out of my house. We worked out at my house. We got up to 10 employees out of my house, and then the HOA was kicking us out of my house. 

While we were building this search engine that could find emails, cell phones, and insights every person in the world that you need to sell to—to build Google for sales, it took us a few years to build. We’re out of my house, we’re bootstrapped. No one would give us money because we’ve got a prototype and they’re like, we want to see you build it, we want to see you sell it—you name it. That’s the reality of building any company if you’ve got no connections like I did. If you have no hotshot VCs like I did, you have to just be scrappy, you have to do whatever it takes. 

We were remote-first for a few years. Then we got a big office, we outgrew the office. The office got shut down by the government. Luckily, it saved me a week before sending a 25,000 ft² office lease. Their lawyer blew that deal, by the way. We were trying to push to sign this 25,000 ft² massive office space. It was very much like a Google here in Columbus that we were going to build a campus and office space in. The lawyers took an extra week and it saved me a lot of money.

Marylou: Silver lining there. 

Brandon: Yeah, exactly. But what we did was we instituted daily standups. We went 100% remote right away. We instituted daily standups across every team. Every morning at 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM, I post a daily motivational message. I highlight the KPIs. I highlight the success. I highlight the positivity and momentum we’re building. For the past year, every day I’m posting. Keeping up the momentum, keeping up the positivity, keeping up the energy, keeping people recognize the flywheel.

We also created a ton of Slack channels. We have customers’ success stories channel, success book channel, and success thought leadership channel. Anytime you see anything good about our platform, anything good about our work, anything good about anything—we would post screenshots of that stuff in these Slack channels so that the team could keep seeing, yes, we’re working 200% harder, 300% harder, but our jobs are secure. We’re winning, we’re growing, we’re scaling, we’re changing the world, and we’re helping the world—a lot of these things. I had to basically break everyone down and that’s why the first chapter and the first tip is you have to break your […] beliefs.

About 1% of top performers do not let other people’s opinions and beliefs hold them back from living the life they want. I had to breakdown our entire company, all of our employees, what their belief systems were because I knew it would get terrorized by the news, by their family, by their peers, by their partners, wives, husbands because everyone’s going to be in a state of fear and this craziness with the pandemic, COVID, life or death. 

I’m like, how do I make sure that these people have the right mindsets, beliefs, and patterns? I got to break them down, build them back up, got to have them develop this constructive paranoia. Where extreme constructive paranoia that everything could be taken from us at any given point in time. No matter what, it’s critical for us to stay humble, stay hungry, and be the hardest working people in the room every single day of the week, in the industry, in the SaaS space. We have to stay humble, hungry, hardest working people in the room and assume that she could get bad quickly. 

Then worked with everyone to eliminate bullshit excuses, don’t buy any get-rich-quick schemes. And when I say get-rich-quick schemes, not only do I mean real get-rich-quick schemes, but also life will be good here in a day or two get-rich-quick schemes. I wanted people to understand how bad this was going to be. If you understand this is going to be a two-year marathon, then you could stop worrying about the past or present and you could go create the future. 

Marylou: Yeah, and develop that endurance. My body of work—prospecting, is all about that endurance muscle for prospecting, it comes over time. I love your idea of the standups. We instituted a daily okay-hour which is similar to your stand up, its objectives, and key results. We would meet in the morning and set the tone of what we hoped to accomplish. What we bought in to accomplish that day. Then we would check in with each other in the evening because we, all of a sudden now—even though we’re remote—we had these tools we used. First, we use Zoom, and then when Zoom had this little hiccup, we had to switch over to a different service because we are a very secure-oriented company. 

We did that and it was amazing. First of all, to see everybody’s houses—because I was in people’s kitchens, I was in people’s bedrooms, people’s closets depending on whether they had kids or not. It was just a humbling experience. We felt a high sense of camaraderie. I can’t explain it, but we all got so much closer because we’re all in the same boat. This thing is affecting everyone at every level, we’re all struggling with it, and that also brought us closer together, but with a structured process like the one you’re talking about from Whatever It Takes, from the new book. It’s like a blueprint of how to navigate through these situations that we don’t have any control over. We really don’t. 

Brandon: I love that you implemented okay hours, what a great system to implement. Being from Cleveland Rockefeller habits follows the okay-hour system and that’s been one of the key pillars of my success. We track everything daily, daily tracking of all of our metrics. You’re one of the smartest sales engineer gurus I’ve ever met, Marylou. You had a big impact on me launching multiple companies and being successful—going from $0 to $100 million in sales, selling for IBM and Google. You have to leverage the data. Every day, we got to analyze the data. 

Your attitude and how you embrace times of adversity—and this is in the book—will mentally make you or break you. The best part about that is you get to decide. Your attitude on how you embrace these times of adversity could be great and they could be terrible and crush you. And when you decide that you’re going to make them great, when you treat rejection—and I know you love data, I call it—when you treat rejection as the data needed for ratification to be successful. I talked about it in the book how I pitched hundreds of venture capitalists. I pitched 347 VCs. Can you believe that? 

Marylou: Yes, I would believe that, Brandon.

Brandon: 347 VCs, 297 of them passed on me. But guess what, every time someone passed, that rejection—your market is not good enough, your idea is not good enough, your team is not smart enough, you don’t live in San Francisco, you didn’t go to MIT or Harvard, your development background isn’t as strong as we want it, you’re not good enough. All of this data you use to optimize—A/B testing, you keep improving, and the rejection data, the data from failure allows you to fast forward to where you need to grow and where you need to go.

That propelled into this theme of never quit. I call it […] quit in the book. It’s a little vulgar, sorry, but you need to go all out. You need to be vulgar with your success. You need to be unsatisfied, relentless with what you need to do right now. The only way that we grew 300% during one of the worst economic times of our history is because we went all out, and that’s critical to do and get to find solutions and not problems. All of these things were a big pillar to it. 

Marylou: One of the biggest messages here, and I remember my father telling me, it’s about choice. He used to tell me the story of the Blue Bird School Bus. If the Blue Bird School Bus took a left-hand turn at the factory, it became a school bus. If it took a right-hand turn, it became this fabulous home-on-wheels where they outfitted it with all the top everything so that you could power that thing around the United States and have a complete living environment—a kitchen, bedrooms, a shower that was chartreuse in color. It was just fabulous home-on-wheels. 

He said Marylou, that’s how life is. You can choose to go left or right and it’s up to you though, to make that choice. That stuck with me forever and I do believe that you’re embodying that whole process of we can choose where we’re going. Yes, we have some baggage. Yes, we have some history. Yes, we have some childhood things that we want to overcome and need to at least make peace with. But at the end of the day, we’re in the driver’s seat. We can decide where we want to go, how we want to get there. There’s a whole community of people like Brandon out there, like myself, who want to help you get there, who are just cheerleading you on to get to that point. But you’ve got to take that first step. 

Brandon: Yeah, 100%. Anyone tuning in listening to this show right now. You commit to constantly growing and improving you’re going to win. Perception is reality and if you can believe you can achieve, and why as a salesperson, entrepreneur, I write this book about mindset beliefs. It’s almost like dieting. If you want to lose weight, diet is 90% of it. In Pareto’s Law, 80/20 Rule. 

I would say if you want to join the top 1%, if you want to become a millionaire in sales like I have and built multiple 8-figure companies—and again, I don’t say that to brag because I score myself on a scale of 1-10, a 1—you need to just go all out believing that you can achieve and perception is reality. If you improve every day, you believe that you could do it, you go all out, you have the right mindset, and you do whatever it takes, you can define your destiny.

Marylou: Sometimes it’s micro-steps and some days it’s big leaps. But there’s always a forward movement. Even the failure is forward. I loved your analogy about failure because one of the best learning experiences for me as a consultant going into clients is to look at their closed loss. Why did we lose? Because there are so many lessons in there as to how we can improve for the next person that comes through our door, or they were able to start a conversation or continue a conversation with. That’s a very important thing.

The other thing is you got to put that ego in your pocket—self-doubt, also ego, also the things that are holding you back. That little person on your shoulder says, maybe you shouldn’t take a risk. In a lot of situations, the risk is good as long as it’s a healthy risk and you’re not doing things that are going to completely obliterate whatever it is that you’re working towards. But there’s always a level of risk in everything. Allow yourself and give yourself permission to take on risk at your pace because like you said, the tiny behaviors are the ones that lead to remarkable results. That’s in your book. 

Brandon: Yeah, 100%. If you can master doing Whatever It Takes, everything in the book, that’s 80% of being successful in sales, marketing, entrepreneurship, and demand generation. You can’t leave someone who never gives up and in life, you’ve got three choices. Choice number one, you could give up. Choice number two, you could give in—the pandemic, the recession, the economy, that’s getting destroyed is also going to destroy me. Or choice number three, you could give it your all and you get to choose. But I always recommend going with option number three. You will never regret giving it your all even if you fail. 

Marylou: Highly recommend option number three.

Brandon: Yeah, 100%. 

Marylou: The book is Whatever It Takes: Master the Habits to Transform Your Business, Relationships, and Life. It’s on Amazon. It’s pre-order. Please consider doing that. It’s a great book and then I’ll put, Brandon, all of your contact information on my website page. It’ll have your beautiful picture and all your connectors. Those of you who are hearing this underlying current of Seamless. I would definitely check out that company because yes, it gave you what we didn’t have, which is the ability to reach people at the best time and also the best number or the best location.

Brandon, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed the podcast.

Brandon: Thank you so much for having me on, Marylou. I appreciate it. You’re someone that’s changed my life forever for the better with your work. I hope everyone tuning in that you learn something from this book or from this podcast that can help you do the same to make this next year your biggest and best yet. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, I post daily sales strategies at seamless.ai. You could join Seamless for free at seamless.ai. That’s seamless.ai. Thank you so much for having me. 

Marylou: Wonderful. Thanks again, Brandon. Take care.

What is the best way to align sales and marketing for revenue growth? Today’s guest has answers. Darrell Amy is the author of the book The Revenue Growth Engine: How to Align Sales and Marketing to Accelerate Growth. Listen in to hear what Darrell has to say about the importance of processes, the power of interest, and the messaging of sales and marketing alignment.

Episode Highlights:

• What got Darrell interested in writing a book
• The alignment between marking and sales and revenue growth
• The revenue growth engine processes
• The core numbers a business needs to know
• The power of interest
• The messaging of marketing and sales alignment
• How to get a focused message in a large company
• The step by step process outlined in Darrell’s book
• The tools available on Darrell’s website

Resources:

Revenue Growth Engine

Text “revenue” to 21000

Transcript

Marylou: Everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler here. Today’s guest is Darrell Amy. He’s the author of a book that was released in June 2020 called The Revenue Growth Engine. The tagline which really got my attention was, How to Align Sales and Marketing to Accelerate Growth. Darrell, welcome to the podcast. I have so many questions.

Darrell: Well Marylou, this is going to be a blast. Thank you so much for having me in today.

Marylou: I love your book because if you look at the table of contents, the first thing is how does the revenue growth engine work? But I would like to kind of go up from that and ask you what your experiences were, or continue to be, in the alignment of sales and marketing, that got you fired up to write a book like this?

Darrell: Actually there’s always a story and it started at a conference. I was invited to a conference and it was all about growth. It was a group of medium-sized technology companies that have gathered together to talk about ideas to grow. I remember when I walked in the room, in the front of the room were the marketing people. I love marketing people. I’ve been involved in marketing since I started a digital marketing agency in 2004. I’ve had the opportunity to work with companies all over North America, Australia, and some of Europe since 2004.

Helping them execute digital marketing strategies, websites, search engines, inbound marketing, and et cetera. The digital marketing people were all on the front row, and they were excited, ready to go, and right behind them were the sales leaders. I started selling 27 years ago. Straight out of university, I took a job in technology sales. Sale rep, sales manager, ran a branch. In 2004, I also started a sales training company and I’ve been involved doing sales development with organizations, including developing training for some Fortune 500 companies.

I’ve been involved like one foot in the sales world, one foot in the marketing world. I’m watching the marketing people, I can see the sales managers. You know who they are because they’re on their phones and the little thought bubbles over their head are, we can be out selling something, why are we in this conference? There were several executives and business owners on the back wall of the room. I can see it like it was yesterday. They were standing there with their cups of coffee and you could see the thought bubbles over their head going, man, why can’t we just get along.

The light bulb came on for me as I was preparing for that conference. I realized you know what, it’s not about marketing. As exciting as all the new things in marketing are right now, all the incredible tools and shiny objects, it’s not about marketing. It’s also not about sales. As much as I believe in sales and as much as I love sales development, sales process, all of that, the reality is it’s actually about growing revenue. When we look at it through the perspective of growing revenue, I discovered that things started coming into much more clarity for me and also for the organizations I get to work with.

Marylou: Okay. Let’s continue down that thread then. Growing revenue obviously involves product share growth for the existing base, expanding, having more loyalty, having more renewals if you’re in a subscription or SaaS type business. It also could involve the net new world, net new logos, new money centers, however you define that. What’s that conversation now from a revenue perspective that makes this alignment more palatable, more natural, more willing parties on both sides to come together. What have you discovered is the magic sauce there to get the conversation going and continued between the two organizations to make this work?

Darrell: That’s a fantastic question. I think there’s 2-3 areas that are really critical that I’ve seen when it comes to aligning marketing and sales to drive growth. The first is what you talked about, and that is to realize that we’re here to drive revenue. There’s only two ways to grow revenue if you boil it all down to its most basic level. It’s just what you said, we either get net new clients, we go out and we land new deals. Or, we cross sell more to our current client base. 

What I found Marylou as I talked with organizations across multiple industries in different parts of the country over and over again, I’m discovering that companies are usually either really good at one or the other. They’re really good at driving net new or they’re really good at cross selling more to their current client base. Where I get excited is with some simple math. You begin to realize, if I’m only good at driving net new, I’m going to have linear growth. It’s going to be a straight line growth. There’s nothing wrong with linear growth, but if I can do net new and cross sell at the same time, I can really begin to accelerate growth and realize some exponential results.

A lot of the organizations that I’m talking with right now obviously as we’re recording this at the end of 2020, there are quite a few organizations that have taken a bit of a revenue hit this year. That’s an understatement. They need to find ways to accelerate in the new year to make sure they’re able to recover growth and get back on the trajectory. I think the best way to do that is to look at your business in terms of what are the sales and marketing processes we have in place for net new and what are the processes that we have in place for cross sell. Usually companies are good at one or the other. Find the one that you’re not good at and begin to put processes in place to ensure that you’re driving both at the same time.

Marylou: One of the scary things always in certain industries about net new is the concept of a finite audience. Meaning, there’s a total addressable market which is one number, and then there are the actual people who you conserve via your product or service. I call it the total serviceable market. It’s a subset of the TAM, the Total Addressable Market. I think one of the scary things about net new is people don’t necessarily know how to plan out a finite audience or a sampling to be able to start doing what they need to do on a consistent basis to generate revenue in those quadrants.

I had one client who is 95% of the base so that would be product share oriented, and then 5% was net new. They have a ubiquitous market but they were kind of stuck and stymied because they also were selling through resellers primarily and just started thinking about this whole concept of direct sales to build market share. I think that they didn’t know if they were good or not at that net new stuff because they had been using a third party channel to do the work for them.

Darrell: Interesting. One of the things that we talk a lot about in the revenue growth engine, I’m a firm believer in processes. The challenge in a lot of organizations that I see is you go into—I spent my career in sales selling workflow automation and business process improvement software. When I look at business, I think about the process.

Marylou: Amen, amen.

Darrell: You go in finance, you have processes for accounts receivable, accounts payable. HR has onboarding processes. Shipping and receiving better have processes, but you go in most marketing or sales departments and what I see is more like the Wild West. You kind of hear the eagle flying overhead, the tumbleweed blows through, there’s a couple gunslinger sales reps leaning up against the doors to the saloon.

In marketing it’s like just run some campaigns or go do an event. In sales, we’re not much better sometimes. The sales leader goes just make some more calls, go sell something. The reality is if we want to be consistent in how we’re executing for both net new and cross sell, we need to make sure we have processes in place. Usually what I tell organizations if I go to an organization for example and they’ve got a great net new business development thing going on, I’ll recommend that they focus on putting some processes in cross sell.

I remember being down in West Palm Beach. It was a technology company, we were doing a revenue growth plan for the company. We had the business owner in the room, the VP of sales, the marketing director, a couple other folks in the room. We’re getting ready to start this whole planning thing to get them going to grow their business. Like all good workshops, I’m standing at the front of the room, I’ve got my marker out, I’m ready to write on the whiteboard. Let’s go around the room. What are your goals? The business owner says, we need to grow more net new business. Everyone goes, yeah. That’s a fantastic start. I write net new business on the board. I said what’s your goal? He says, well we have a goal it’s modest, but we want to grow 10% year over year. I write down 10%. Then I asked, what did you do last year?

Now, I’m kind of bracing myself for them to say, we did -7% or we did 3.2%. The business owner looks back at me and goes, we did 9.8%. I started laughing and I said, congratulations. We could round that up. You hit your goal. Why are we here? Then I asked about their new business initiative. They had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in people, partnerships, training for this new services offering that was a great fit for their ideal clients and I said, how’s this new business going? I already knew the answer. That’s when everybody looked down at the table and the owner was like, it’s a dismal failure.

That’s when we realized, what we need to do here is we need to put some processes in place for them to manage their client base. It’s simple things. The marketing team got to work. They said, let’s put together a client loyalty program. Let’s get a client communication process put in place. They’ve all been overlooked in the goal of driving net new business. With the client loyalty program in place, it gave the sales team the excuse to begin doing what they needed to be doing all along which was quarterly business reviews with their clients. They said, I want to come talk to you about this new loyalty program. One of the benefits of their platinum program was that their ideal clients got a quarterly business review.

They got that cadence of conversation going and being in touch with the business goals inside their ideal clients. Guess what happened? They started cross selling this new service to their client base and now they’re on track. They’re still growing 10% year over year in net new and they’re growing their revenue per client by cross selling. Now the company’s on a great trajectory of growth. Sometimes, I guess the moral of that story is the area where you need to grow may be a little bit different than what you instinctively think it is.

Marylou: Right. If you start writing those numbers down like in your book, you talked about doubling your revenue in less than three years. When you first think about it, you read that phrase, that sentence and you’re like, how does that work? How do I do that? You show such simple and beautiful math on how to get there, and it’s not this crazy formula. It’s simple math.

Darrell: I think there’s two core numbers the business needs to know. By the way, these are really helpful if you’re trying to set goals for the new year. Especially at the end of this somewhat tumultuous year, whether you took a big dip in revenue or whether you were signed with Plexiglas and personal protective equipment and you had a massive spike in revenue. The question is, how are you going to set realistic goals for the new year?

The two metrics around net new and cross sell are really simple. The first metric you need to know is how many customers do we have. That’s a simple number. How many active customers do we have? It’s a little different for every business model, but once you determine that number, there’s your line in the sand. The second number is what’s your revenue per customer, which is just a factor of taking that total revenue and dividing it by the total number of customers you have.

Now you’ve got two numbers to work with. You say, let’s see, we have 1000 customers and our revenue per customer is $10,000 per year. If we have the right sales and marketing processes in place, how many new customers could we add? Could we go from 1000 to 1100 or 1200. If we have the right cross sell sales and marketing processes in place, what can we do to grow that revenue per customer from $10,000 on average to say $12,000? 

We add those two numbers together. Marginal growth, just modest growth of, you can play with this on the spreadsheet. I’ll give the link to you in just a second, but if you grow 12% in net new and 12% in revenue per customer cross sell, you can double your revenue in about 36 months.

In fact listeners, if you want access to a simple spreadsheet to start playing with those growth goal numbers, just text the word REVENUE to 21000 and that gets you access to our tool kit. To me, this is why I get so passionate about this right now Marylou, companies have got to grow. I think when you look at the growth goals, if you’re trying to do it all in net new or trying to hit all of that aggressive growth goal and cross sell, it feels overwhelming because it is. But if you can show modest growth in both of those areas simultaneously, you actually can really achieve something phenomenal and exponential results.

Marylou: Yeah, I think to your point about the revenue per client, if you’re not in a SaaS company and you’re not on those monthly recurring revenue and you want to be able to think about how do I do that? I remember one of my mentors J. Abraham used to say, there are three ways to grow a business. New clients which is the net new. There is an increase in your average deal size. When you do sell a client, bundle a few things in or try to get a more increased cost like you’re saying. And the other one is, buy more frequently. 

For those of you who are not in the SaaS world, there are some ways that you can get to that number that Darrell’s talking about, not just one time pricing, but frequency over time as well can also get you there. That opened up my creativity when I heard that, because that gave me two avenues for the existing base. If I wasn’t in a SaaS world, or if I didn’t sell professional services, tech services or whatever it is, then I thought wow, this is super doable. I love the idea of the 12%, 36 months, compounding. I love it.

Darrell: There you go. It’s the power of interest. I am a huge J. Abraham fan. I think one of the great places to go to get ideas is his book. I think it’s now 20 years old, How to Get Everything You Can out Of All You’ve Got. One of the things I really enjoy about this, and I think this is something we can all learn from J. Abraham and I’m a firm believer in is, whatever industry you’re in, if you’re in SaaS, or if you’re in financial services, or whatever industry you’re in, it’s always a good idea to pick your head up and look around outside your industry for ideas. Earlier I shared that technology company in South Florida. They looked up outside their industry and realized my American Express card has a loyalty program.

Marylou: Wow.

Darrell: Back when I used to travel, I really liked my American Express card because I can go into the airport, I get all kinds of different perks, they have a special little area for their cardholders in the airport. I feel really special. It’s going to take a lot to get me to change. We started looking at loyalty programs like American Express, or the airline loyalty programs, credit card programs, or even your local sandwich shop and we said, what could we bundle together for our platinum level ideal clients to help them really appreciate it?

The funny thing about that, Marylou, is we had that conversation. I’ve had this with a bunch of companies now because it’s such a great idea to do a loyalty program. You realize you’re already doing all kinds of really special things for your ideal clients, why not just tell them about it. Put it together in a program. You’re already giving them white glove service and all of that.

Marylou: Communicate that in and be excited about it, share that information. The biggest thing that my audience hopefully by now since I’ve been lecturing them since 2016 with this podcast, one of the things that I really want people to recognize is that we have a variety of ways to add value in our conversations. We will never bother people as long as our minds and our mindset knows in our heart of hearts that we’re here to serve and that what we have to say to them will add value.

I think that the loyalty programs really bring that out, because if you do your homework and you do talk to people to gather information and intel as to what they enjoy, what their experiences have been, I think you talked about this in your book when you’re talking about how to build an inventory of all of this. It’s really about a day in the life of your client. Understanding at a deep and meaningful level how they utilize your product, why they love it, what they’d like to see improved. Just really listen with those two ears of yours and understand that anything that they tell you is a win because—why they want to continue to do business with you. If there are some things that are not as pleasant, then you got them on the table. You can deal with them.

Darrell: I think you’re bringing up for what I think is another key area of marketing and sales alignment which is around the message. So often, companies aren’t aligned between marketing and sales. I was talking to an account executive for a bank in southern California recently and he was laughing about this. He said Darrell, I went to meet with one of our largest clients and he pulls out a piece of collateral that got mailed to him by our marketing department about a program I’ve never heard of before.

It really helps for sales and marketing to work on the message together. It helps when we remember what people are actually buying. I firmly believe that nobody buys the product you’re selling. They actually buy the outcomes that product or service delivers. We know that, but we miss it so much in both our sales and marketing messaging. In addition to J. Abraham, another one of my all time favorite thought leaders and gurus in marketing is Theodore Levitt.

Theodore Levitt, father of modern marketing, Harvard Business School, walks into his class, and on the first day of marketing class 101, holds up an electric drill bit and says, nobody has ever bought one of these. All they bought was the hole. It’s so funny because Seth Godin would go on to say, they didn’t actually buy the hole, they bought the ability to drill a hole so they can hang the plaque on the wall and make their significant other happy or look good.

Marylou: Or hang their coat up.

Darrell: Yeah, whatever it is, they weren’t buying the drill bit, they were buying the ability to whatever outcome that delivers. One of the things we have to remember especially right now is, the outcomes that your clients expect or need probably have shifted in the crisis we’ve had this last year, and it will shift again. Right after the Covid crisis happened in the technology world, Gartner which is one of the main research companies, went out and started asking executives what they wanted or what their needs were.

Basically, they were asking what outcomes do you want. It shifted. Obviously, maybe in the previous year where they would have said we want more productivity, we want to scale our companies, we want to drive growth and all of that. After the crisis started, it was what you’d expect. We want resiliency, redundancy. We want the ability to do remote working. 

Here’s the challenge, if you have a sales playbook, a talk track from last year, 2019, and this goes to our marketing friends as well. If you have email sequences put together for 2019 when you send something out that says, in this season of explosive growth, dot, dot, dot. People are going to go, what? Instead, we got to rework our message. 

I think it goes back to what you’re talking about which is, get sales and marketing together. Get on a Zoom call with your best clients and ask them, what challenges are you facing in your business right now? What are your goals for the new year? What do you see on the horizon? Listen closely, because in that conversation are going to be the outcomes that your clients expect. That’s what you need to lead every prospecting call with, every prospecting email with, every client quarterly business review conversation with. It’s those outcomes, and those types of questions, because that’s what’s going to get through the filter, and get the attention that we so desperately crave in sales people.

I think the outcomes are going to shift in the new year as well whenever the new normal happens. I don’t know when that’s going to be or what that’s going to look like. The important thing is going to be, when things do shift, that we go out and we ask those questions again. What outcomes do you want, and what are your business goals, and challenges? So that we can drive sales conversations and marketing messaging around stuff that’s relevant. I think that’s a good thing for sales and marketing teams to work on together.

Marylou: You bring up a good point, and I’m sitting here putting myself in the shoes of listeners that are maybe working at a larger company, where sometimes the chain of command of actually sitting down face to face, belly to belly with marketing is a very difficult task because there are 35 people in marketing or 100 people in marketing.

Darrell: That’s right, across 18 offices.

Marylou: Do you have some suggestions if we really get this focused message as you call it in your book—what are some tricks here? I know for small companies, I’m working with a $40 million company right now. I have everybody’s cell phone numbers, so we can just talk. As you get up into the $300 million plus, billion dollar plus company, do you find it a challenge or do you have some tricks of the trade that you can share with us about trying this dialogue going?

Darrell: It’s a great question and I rolled out a sales training program in 2018 for a $9 billion company and I used to work for a $43 billion company in sales. Obviously, in a $43 billion company, you’re not going to get the voice of marketing. You might eventually, maybe, but you got to get results today. What I do like about being a sales professional is you’ve got the opportunity to drive whatever conversation you want to drive. You don’t have to wait for marketing. Marketing will put together their brochures and websites and whatever they do. It may all be product focused and that’s fine. It is what it is. You can’t wait for that to change. 

I think as sales professionals, I challenge you to have those conversations with your best clients, take them out to lunch. Take them out for a virtual cup of coffee and just say, I’m really curious what’s going on in your business today? Don’t sell, just listen and ask. Don’t just ask questions, in fact, don’t ask questions about your narrow product area. Ask questions about their business at large. I firmly believe that if you’re going to sell something to somebody, especially if it’s in a B2B space where there’s multiple decision makers, you better have your recommendation connected to at least one of their top three business goals or challenges.

Otherwise, you just are going to get put on the backburner of nice ideas we’ll get around to someday. How do you find out what those top three goals are and challenges? You listen. This is where your current clients are an incredible resource especially right now in this changing market. Listen closely to what they say and they will give you the keys and even the very words and phrases to use to be able to grow your business with a message that actually resonates.

Once you start crushing sales records, maybe someday they’ll send a marketing person out to ride with you and you can get some alignments.

Marylou: Right. You do talk about, in the second part of your book, for those of you who are like this is sounding great. What do I do? How do I do this? My people are always about what’s the process? How are we going to do this? I know that you have this thing that you developed called the outcomes inventory. I think you called it a list, I’m forgetting. There’s a step by step in the book of how to go about this, correct?

Darrell: There is. The idea of the outcomes inventory came from sales people. We have a product inventory, right?

Marylou: Right.

Darrell: A price book. Here are all the products that we have. If you go back to Theodore Levitt, The Drill Bit, people don’t buy products, they buy outcomes. I think every sales person in addition to having a product inventory should have a list of all the outcomes they can deliver. I was actually talking about this this morning on Revenue Growth Live. Revenue Growth Live is our live cast on Tuesdays and Thursdays on LinkedIn. In the book we talk about four categories of outcomes in the B2B space. There’s financial outcomes and risk outcomes. 

Financial ones are obvious, how do we help you raise revenue and decrease expenses. Risk, how do we help you decrease risk. This is an area that a lot of sales professionals haven’t necessarily given a lot of thought to unless you’re in the insurance business, but reducing the risk is a huge opportunity. Our good friend, Jay Abraham, has a lot to say about that, risk reversal. Financial outcomes, risk outcomes, organizational outcomes, how are you going to help the organization and people be better? Last but not least are the personal outcomes. There’s a book that I’m looking forward to reviewing. I love the title of it. It’s B2B, it’s P2P. Business to business is person to person.

We all know this in sales that people buy from people and every decision maker or an influencer on that buying team—and Brent Adamson just recently chimed in on a podcast I was in. I was asking what’s the number now? He said it’s up to 12 decision makers and influencers on the average B2B buying decision. Of course, being the co-author of The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, the reality is we also have to understand the outcomes that each of the decision makers and influencers want in the deal. I think we should create an inventory of all that. Here is an inventory of all the outcomes we can deliver. 

That way as we are creating sales messaging, whether it’s prospecting, or whether we’re writing an email, whatever we’re doing, proposals, another area. Let’s make the messaging always lead with outcomes. Always lead with outcomes, and then marketing can play from the same outcomes inventory, and just maybe, the company’s marketing will say the same thing that the sales people are saying. Right there’s the dream. Really, we kind of chuckle about that but we live in a post trust world. 

The number one thing a sales professional needs is trust, yet trust is at an all-time low. Not just with the sales profession, but just in general. The fake news world we live in, the trust is just really at an all-time low. It’s very important we build trust. We get through that filter by talking about outcomes. We build trust as we demonstrate that we’ve been able to deliver those outcomes. The flip side of that is if I hear one thing out of the sales reps mouth and then I go to the website and I hear something different from the website, I just took a big dent in trust. I really eroded trust. We kind of chuckle a lot of times in the business world about marketing and sales need to get along and say the same thing. You know what? You really do.

You really do need to be saying the same thing. Otherwise, that buyer talks to the sales rep then hits Google, hits your website and goes that’s not what the rep said and they’re on to the next thing.

Marylou: It introduces friction. It’s just one more reason why they don’t have to engage with you further, which is so disappointing to say the least.

Darrell: For all the work we put in, it introduces friction. It’s so sad.

Marylou: It is. People, the book is called The Revenue Growth Engine: How to Align Sales and Marketing to Accelerate Growth. You mentioned that, I think it’s embedded and sprinkled in the book, the key to some tools, do you want to go ahead and talk about what tools are available for folks?

Darrell: We’ve got a growing toolkit on the website. Once again, I think I mentioned earlier you can text the word revenue to 21000 and that will get you a link straight to our website. In fact right now, and this is brand new, you’ll be the first to know about it here on the podcast. You can actually get a free copy of Revenue Growth Engine if you’ll be kind enough to pay for shipping. We’ll send you one. I want to get this out to companies. I passionately believe that right now, 2021 is a make or break year for a lot of sales teams and a lot of companies.

We had a rough year this year, we got to bring it next year. I want to help with that. In the tool kit, we’ve got our revenue growth planner. We’re putting the outcomes inventory worksheet. There’s an ideal client worksheet going on there. We’re continually adding to that. Just stop by, revenue to 21000 gets you the link. You can get to revenuegrowthengine.net. Get a copy of the book and get the tools. My goal is I’m passionate about helping great companies grow.

This season that we’re in right now, I didn’t plan on launching a revenue growth book in the middle of the pandemic. Nobody planned on doing anything in the middle of a pandemic. I’m realizing now as we look back over this year and we look forward into the next year that—I’m not saying growth was easy before all of this started but as we look back, it sure seems like it was a whole lot easier than it is right now. All that means to me is we’ve got to be strategic. 

In the sales world, there’s that mantra, just go make more calls. I get that. I started in a hardcore field sales and I get that. Activity is critical. The way we go about doing it, the processes that are behind it, the message that’s behind it, working on not just quantity but also quality is something that is really critical right now as we move into the new year and work to accelerate our growth

Marylou: It’s definitely one of the mantra’s quality and multiplying your results for me. That’s always big. You’d take that same hour and work on 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x your results. If you focus on the quality of your sales conversations and you really understand the channels with which these folks are now communicating, they’re still out there communicating, it just may not be the normal channels that you are used to pre-Covid but I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there for people in certain fields. This is a time if things are slow, like you said, to really focus on the sales conversations, how to have better ones, more meaningful ones, more actionable ones.

In your book, you also talk about not only do we have the outcome inventory list, but we have the proof and specificity points of how to get these people to logically bridge from what they want to it’s here. By the way, there’s a new normal even above that that you may not have thought of yet that other clients, colleagues of yours are already enjoying by partnering with us. I think that list is the Bible for me and that’s what I like to do. I think of it in rows and columns. I love the word inventory because people get inventory. You understand what that means.

I think that absorbing this book, now we’re entering the holiday season, it’s 2020 right now and it’s a great time to get these books and start hunkering down and planning, and getting all that part done and see how you want to navigate through a book like this. It would just be perfect timing to do that. Thank you so much for your time today. We had a great conversation. I will make sure every bit of link is on your page so that people can get a hold of you as they need to. Again, I very much appreciate your time on the podcast today.

Darrell: Thanks for having me. Marylou, I appreciate all that you’re doing here. It’s just fantastic.

Marylou: Wonderful take care now.

Darrell: Bye.

What’s the best way to sell services? How does selling services differ from selling products? How can you convince a prospect that a particular professional service is right for them? Today’s guest is Liston Witherill, and his message is: serve, don’t sell. Listen in to hear what Liston has to say about what “serve, don’t sell” means, what the success path for selling services is, and the four steps that he recommends. 

Episode Highlights:

• Why Liston got into professional services
• The success path for selling services
• What “serve, don’t sell” means
• Understanding that you’re adding value
• Drawing the map
• Understanding clients’ motivation
• Helping people make decisions
• Showing what’s possible
• Which slides should be in your slide deck
• Asking questions that demonstrate that you understand the prospect’s problem
• Case studies and testimonials
• What’s in Liston’s training

Resources:

Serve Don’t Sell

Modern Sales Podcast

Transcript

Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Liston Witherill. He has this really cool offering on servedontsell.com. What I really love about what he’s doing is he’s taking what we think of as the invisible, the intangible way to sell. You and I know that most of what we talk about here on this podcast are widgets of selling something that you can touch. What Liston does is he works with sales executives and professionals in selling services, professional services. If you have a professional service arm, he would be the one to help you take that business and grow it. It’s not on referral.

One of the things we always say is, oh well, professional services, that’s referral. You’re working with clients. I am here to tell you that Liston has a methodology and a process that he is going to talk about today on how to grow your business. This is a professional service, independent consultants, firms that are not selling widgets, how to take control of that, and actually build pipelines so that you can consistently and predictably close your deals. Welcome to the podcast!

Liston: Thank you and predictable is right on brand. I am very happy to be here. Thank you.

Marylou: Yeah, very good. This is always a grey area for us. Yeah, professional services will grow. What got you focused on this really important and niche-y kind of selling environment?

Liston: It’s interesting you say niche-y because basically the whole economy is moving more towards the service model and increasingly I’m seeing even software companies starting to add services and consulting arms to their product offerings as they start to consider how do we continue to grow revenue, and also how do we make customers more successful with our product, especially big enterprise offerings. What got me into this, I’m a scientist by training, I have a Master’s Degree in Environmental Science and Management. My stated goal to go to grad school was to go into consulting, which is what every little kid wants to be when they grow up, if you ask a 5 year old. I want to be a consultant.

After grad school, what I wanted to do was learn the business of consulting. Going into grad school, the idea was I really need to understand the science of the environment and how this works. And then I wanted to go operate on the business side of environmental consulting. I was the Director of Marketing and Business Development at—not a huge firm. We had about 80 people, we’re doing about $8–$10 million when I got there. We grew steadily over a few years.

While I was there, I kept asking the question, obviously this was my whole job, how do we grow the firm? What is driving our growth now? What have we done in the past that has worked or hasn’t worked? Also, importantly, why am I surrounded by so many experts who have this really weird, awful feeling about selling anything? It was really interesting that a lot of them, their orientation towards their job is in this case, I do science, I do my expert work, I’m not in the business of selling anything. But of course, our compensation was determined by how much revenue they brought in.

Obviously, they were selling something. I’ve been on a quest ever since I started that job and eventually went out and started my own marketing firm to figure out what is it about services that are so damn hard to sell?

Marylou: Right. Speaking from someone who is in awe of what you’re doing right now, it’s one of those things for me that I don’t understand the multiples of professional services. Could you make it tangible? My brain is always wrapped around going to the IPO. By growing from the standpoint of a capital thing as opposed to what I can say operational, I’d lump professional services into that. The second thing I’m always timid about is those are relationship sales. A lot of times, it takes long to establish a relationship. The work that I do is like duty dating and the work that you do is like engagement and getting married kind of thing. This is me not understanding, even though here I am a consultant, right? But most of my work, I do outbound work and I get referral and inbound. It’s a pretty nice mix.

It’s really interesting that you’ve developed a system for it. What I’m really curious about is how you go about getting people started on this path who are naturally reluctant. Because they’ve used sales as a not so nice word. It’s something that they don’t want to be associated with. Why don’t you share with us, when you get someone in and they want to grow their business, and they’re selling only, they’re selling services, how do you organize them down that success path so that they start seeing the value if this is a repeatable portion of their pipeline?

Liston: The first thing I tell them is a mindset part which is you got to kill your inner salesperson. Marylou, you know all the stats about how salespeople are one of the most hated professions in existence. The reason is, we all have had some sort of negative experience with that salesperson who is willing to be manipulative—which is different than persuasive. Meaning they are using parts of the truth in order to move you in a direction that maybe you wouldn’t choose otherwise if you heard the whole truth. Which is very different from persuasion.

We have experienced people who are totally self serving, all they care about is getting the sale so that they can get their commission or add revenue to their bottom line. I think what a lot of people feel when they hear the word sales is that it means I’m going to lose my integrity—and my integrity matters a lot. As a service provider, my reputation is a core business asset in terms of attracting new clients, in terms of maybe even being able to charge a price premium. That reputation is critical so I don’t want to trade that off by being this nasty used car salesman, of course the image everyone conjures.

Where I start is I say, kill your inner salesperson. You don’t need to be that version of sales. The other thing as I’ve done this work has been really obvious is when someone says the word sales, 10 people can mean 10 different things.

Marylou: Right.

Liston: Right. We need to get an understanding of what that means. The way I define it in when I say serve don’t sell, what I mean is, the goal of a sale is to help people make an informed decision about the outcomes that they want whether they choose us or not. What I want to be is an educator, in that way, when I’m working with experts in service providers, all I tell them is look, the sales process, your expertise is fairly invisible to that prospect or buyer in the beginning. What you have an opportunity to do throughout the sales process is demonstrate what it will be like to work with you in some small way right away. Which isn’t to say giveaway free work, but it is to say be organized, it is to say predict and understand what questions are going to be asked and how you respond to them.

These fundamental things that I think are if not un-addressed, under addressed by most service providers is where we always have to start.

Marylou: One of the things that I have noticed in working with people who don’t consider themselves sales professionals is that they feel like they’re bugging people. They don’t want to be identified with that. There’s also this other aspect that they don’t think they can add value every time they pick up the phone or every time they are face to face, or every transaction or conversation that they have, they feel like they’re bothering people. I see that more in areas where you’re selling professional services than perhaps widgets. Do you find that that’s another portion of this that you have to unprogram them before, is that you’re not bugging people, you’re adding value. Does that go hand in hand with what you said about educating and demonstrating what it’s like to work with you?

Liston: Yeah, absolutely. The key driver of that feeling is the curse of knowledge. As an expert, we have 400 or 500 levels of understanding of a topic and our clients have a maybe a 100 level understanding of our area of expertise. We quickly forget what it was like to be that 200, 300, 400 level student. Therefore we forget how easy it would be for us to add value to the client.

The other thing that I would say is in these situations—you know this from prospecting in any sort of outbound effort—if you can help or prompt people with a yes or no decision or a relatively easy decision to make, that can help them qualify themselves. One of the big mistakes—and you must’ve preached this for years—is leading with something like do you have 30 minutes for a meeting next Tuesday, is not where we want to start with anybody. But if I’m an accountant and someone has come to me and said my books are a mess, I don’t know if I can hire anybody right now, and I want to make sure I hit 20% profit margin this year. I don’t think you’re bugging them if you reach out and say, hey, are you ready to make sure we hit this profit margin together? That’s not bugging them. 

I think there’s this human tendency—and this isn’t limited to service providers, it’s just human nature—to focus on the negative experiences. That time when a salesperson just would not get the message and will never stop bugging us, and sometimes legitimately they are annoying, we can agree on that, some of them are, we tend to remember those moments and not the moments where I was interrupted in the middle of the day. I picked up my phone and I was like, yeah, I do have mold on my basement. Let’s talk about that. Your timing is perfect.

We overweighed some of those negative experiences and that’s part of the problem.

Marylou: But falling under the heading of mindset, what I like to do is substitute the word selling for adding value. I have a post-it note, it says, how can I add more value. Every day, I’m looking at that, how can I add more value? How can I be more of an advisor, a trusted person that you can call and ask questions of? That’s really where I see myself, is more of a mentor, giving back—whatever you want to call it. That also elevates you to a place where when you do have these conversations, you’re doing good work, you’re really helping.

If you can get over the sale versus service, serve don’t sell—that’s the perfect way to think about how we can navigate through a sales process especially if we don’t consider ourselves as a salesperson.

Liston: Right. What I tell my clients is I’m not asking you to become a salesperson. I’m asking you to have better communication skills, is really what it comes down to. Why is it so hard to sell services? They’re intangible. It’s like a blackbox. I don’t get to see what’s on the other side. In the beginning, all I have is your word that you’re awesome and that you can deliver for me. Of course, you’re going to say that. Why wouldn’t you say that?

The more we can demystify what it’s like to buy from us, I have this circular argument which isn’t sufficient to explain it, but sums it up nicely. The reason services are so hard to sell is they’re so hard to buy. There are lots of reasons for that. Some of it comes down to trust, to the opaqueness, your lack of clarity and what people will actually be getting both in terms of features and benefits. Are they buying inputs, outputs, or value? You should be really clear about that up front. I think all of those things add up to increase clarity of communication and a lot of folks also will say—this is the other objection, Marylou is—you don’t understand. My services, they’re just hard to sell because no two clients are alike.

Marylou: What’s that saying? If I had a nickel for every time I heard that.

Liston: Right. I always say, okay, cool. Let’s look at your five top clients, what problems did they have? We could just map out very easily and I can just prove that in less than 10 minutes. I could say, oh, actually, you’re just maybe being too specific or you’re choosing the wrong categories, but certainly we can identify patterns in why people buy from you. If you’re truly right about the idea that no two clients are the same, you’re lacking focus in your business. That’s a separate problem that we can’t solve in sales.

I think there’s a lot of reasons for why folks are feeling this way. The good news is all of them can be addressed.

Marylou: Pretend our mindset is now ready to absorb the next step or the parallel step of actually putting together a selling system that encompasses what you’re talking about. I heard you say map, I heard you say building a list of what motivates people. Tell us a little bit about that part of it. One of the things that I would struggle with doing this is substantiating my claims with proof and specificity. That I think is, it’s the bane of all my folks’ existence is we can find the challenges, we can contrast that to how I could be, should be, or will be, but then when we’re trying the substantiate the claim that we are the best choice for them, that’s where things get a little muddy. I’m curious to hear from you, the system itself of preparations. I am a big fan of preparing and planning. If I was coming and selling my product, which is advisory services, the selling system, what does that look like?

Liston: Let me just walk through the steps and then I want to come back to what you said about building credibility or showing proof—substantiating your claims. Four steps, number one is to draw the map. In order to draw a map, we need to know where we’re standing and where we plan to go. Only then can we plan a route. A lot of service providers haven’t even sat down to say, okay, for me to get a new client, what needs to happen? Do I need to sign an NDA? Do I talk to the business owner? Or do I have five people involved? Who’s involved? Do I need to talk to the head of IT? We need to figure out what that is back to this premise of it’s hard to sell services because it’s hard to buy them.

Your clients may not know how to buy your services. Your responsibility is to teach them. Drawing the map really comes down to having a goal for every meeting and understanding what needs to happen—start to finish—in order to close a new client, and then setting up an agenda in next steps. These are the book ends on every meeting. What are we going to do today and what are we going to do next? If you can do that, you’re going to greatly accelerate the process and win more deals.

Step two is to understand clients’ motivation. The way I think about this really comes down to pain and reward. We have two systems in our brains. System one and system two, these come from Dan Kahneman and Amos Tversky. System one is the automatic part of our brain. That’s the survival part of the “reptilian” brain. Things that are painful, we want to run away from because that’s how we survive. If a lion is coming at us, don’t bother asking me what the meaning of life is, I just need to get away from the damn lion.

In the sale, we have both pain and we have gain that we need to message around. The gain is what is that awesome future that this client could reach. But the pain is, why should you even consider doing it? What’s wrong with you now? Both of those need to be present. I’ve had some public arguments with my friend Jason about which one is more impactful. From an evolutionary standpoint, we’re much more motivated to avoid pain. But I would say from a sales standpoint and a marketing standpoint, it’s really effective to message around how awesome the future can be. And then in the sale, identify what are the causes of pain that makes the client attracted to that message in the first place. The only way we can do this is by asking great questions and understanding each individual’s motivation.

Marylou: Okay. Just to comment on that, what we like to do is state pain and then have a contrast. The example of that would be the fat-skinny ads that are very effective. Because you can visually see someone who’s not in a great shape, maybe not as happy, that has frown on his or her face. And then on the next side of the page is the outcome, that you’re going to be like this. That’s the combination of the two together. The pain of something and the gain that you can expect. That rises to a level of desire that also can motivate people to act.

In our messaging, we like to combine the two and then that proof and specificity to give them a reason why to act now. We use all of those things you just said in item number two. The motivation, pain and gain, and then this new normal of what they can expect that they may not even have thought of yet because they haven’t been involved with the work that you do.

Liston: I want to get that last point, that’s my step number four. Because I think we need to go a long way of painting the picture for our client about how things can be different. Step three is about helping people make decisions. This is where most service providers fall down in being able to charge and actually get premium pricing. The reason for that is a lot of people don’t understand that the way we make decisions is based on comparison and relative information.

Marylou, one way that you can charge premium pricing, you have tons of accolades, you have this podcast, you have a really famous book that you wrote. But it’s also helpful if someone’s talking to you and you say okay, why do you want to hire me? What will you get out of this? You can go through this value setting exercise where the whole point of that exercise is for the client to anchor herself on to that awesome outcome that they’re going for. Whatever that outcome is, if you’re targeting the right prospects, your price is going to be a small fraction of that. That is a way to help people decide. 

Also, a lot of people make the mistake of showing one single price or giving one single option, which is not the way most people make decisions. I just upgraded my home video studio here where I shoot my YouTube videos and do these interviews, I will tell you, I looked at a lot of cameras before I made the decision. That’s common. I don’t believe in services people will shop around to that extent. But we need a way to justify to ourselves why am I making this decision. We need both the emotional—what is it that I want and what am I aspiring to. But we also need the rational—oh, this is a good idea because X. Usually, it’s justifying the investment.

And then step four, I think we should dwell on this a little bit is in showing what’s possible. I like to tell stories here. If you follow my methodology, you gave your client the map in the beginning, you told them here’s what we’re going to do, here are all the steps that we need to take and we’re going to have our first, second, third call. In the second step, I went to the client and I figured out what is motivating them to make a change—both positive and negative motivation. In the third step I’m giving them ways to make a decision. Now, in the fourth step, I’m going to illustrate for them exactly how this is going to work. I’m going to tell a story about where they are now and where they’re going. The only logical conclusion of that story is how my solution will be the one to help them. This is all assuming you’re talking to the right people and not a square peg in a round hole kind of person here.

If you’re doing your qualification right, you should disinvite anybody early on from your sales process and from doing business with you. Assuming you’re talking to the right people, this story should just be the absolute natural conclusion to this person’s problem. It’s interesting, I have a very particular way of putting together a slide deck, which I know some people in services are allergic to slide decks. But my barometer for how mature your sales process is, is can you put together a slide deck that does your whole presentation in under 10 slides. A lot of people can’t.

I’ll tell you exactly what those slides should be and why. You don’t have time to go into that right now, but putting together that deck allows me in a message both around feelings and facts and it allows me to tell a story of where they’re starting from to where they’re going to end up and exactly what I’m going to do to help guide them there.

Marylou: Right. That’s great. I do love the idea of a deck like that. We used to call them pitch decks.

Liston: It’s such a dirty word now.

Marylou: I know. That sounds very dirty. It did cover the reason why and where we are today, what the issues are associated with that. Sometimes we did interviews ahead of time so we got a clear understanding of their unique issues that don’t exist anywhere else on the planet. From there, we can embed that in there. I love the step number three about helping people make decisions. Even in the product world, we can get people excited about what this can do for them. I remember in my world, a lot of times, once we qualify them from the standpoint of they fit the round hole with the round pegs, we got that going, and they want to work with us, and they want to explore more. We pass it over to a field salesperson, usually, who takes the rest of the way. We don’t hit prices very often. We give them range, we’re done.

This understanding of helping them make a decision is so important in order to avoid price issues even with products, not just services, with products as well.

Liston: Yeah. I don’t know if you know Blair Enns. He’s just an awesome business thinker, fantastic. He writes a lot about pricing. In his core materials, one of the things he talks about is having the value conversation. That’s really what I mean when I say help them decide, is give them the information. Again, the information they need to make an informed decision. If you say to someone, working with Marylou is $30,000 or $50,000. That’s the devoid of all of the context of why should I even care about this? Okay, so what, $50,000? To one person that may sound like a fortune, to another person, it would be like oh no, we’re looking for more of like a $500,000 consultant.

This idea of this invisible hand that’s guiding market prices often doesn’t apply very well to services. Certainly, doesn’t demonstrate for the client what would be in it for them. What do they stand to gain? Again, both emotionally and from a rational standpoint. The feeling of knowing that I can hire someone without going broke. Man, what is that worth? We may not be able to put a number or that, but to a business owner, that’s worth a lot of money to me.

Marylou: That’s the biggest difference. The ability to map the roadmap of growth. To get a sense and a comfort that you’re not living in a peak and valley, that there’s a glide path here to the revenue goals that you’ve said or maybe you want to hand off your company to your family members or sell it to another firm or whatever it is. There’s something at the end of the rainbow there that you’re trying to achieve. To have a clear picture of that, that would get you out of bed every morning and make sure that you’re adding value on a daily basis to your clients. That’s great.

Liston: One thing I wanted to come back to is this idea of proof that you brought up earlier. This is a difficult one for services in particular because I use way too many software products, Marylou. I’ll admit it. I don’t really need proof. They can put whoever they want on their website, but for a lot of software products, I can go sign up for a free trial or maybe sign up for a one month of the software for $50–$100 and I can go try it out. I don’t need third party stories nearly as much to make a decision because it’s tangible, I can go try it.

Services often don’t have that. There are ways we can de-risk the client’s decision by giving a smaller version of our service. For the most part, they’re taking a giant risk. That’s the way I look at it is, proof is so important in services because the information is so asymmetric. As the service provider, I know way more about what I’m doing than the buyer ever will. Whereas with the product, it’s not the balance is much different. I see a few different ways that you can demonstrate proof. One is—I’m big on this—if you ask great questions that challenge the person’s thinking to the point where they say, damn, I should’ve asked that question five years ago. That’s going to start to prove to them that you understand their problems better than they do.

This is a very underestimated way of proving that you understand your client and that you know what you’re doing is asking great questions. The reason it’s underestimated is because I can’t really give you a formula on how to do this perfectly. The more you specialize as a service provider, meaning you either focus on a single problem or you focus on a single vertical, or ideally both, a problem within a vertical, then you’re going to be able to ask great questions. 

But now, the mechanical ways that we can do it: case studies. The whole format for case study is where did your clients start, what did they achieve, and what did you do to get them there? That’s your case study format.

The other one is testimonials. What do people say out of their own mouths about working with you? I’d say that’s less a thing in really high end enterprise or corporate services. It becomes much more about case studies. The one thing I’ll say about case studies that a lot of people get wrong is they think if they have a collection of three or five case studies across all different client verticals that that’s going to work, generally it won’t. You need to present each client type; by industry, by job title, however you identify your perfect fit client. You have to have case studies that will resonate specifically for them. 

I work with business owners. All my case studies that you’ll see are with business owners. All of my testimonials are business owners. Because then, the person I’m trying to attract will read that and it will be more resonant with them.

Marylou: Right. What we do in our world is we have decision makers, we have direct influencers. The direct influences are the folks that will either get us to the first meeting or the table to start the discussion, they’ll get us to the point where we can continue the discussion, and those people may not be involved in the actual decision making process, but it is important that they see their peers and colleagues written up or at least demonstrated that they are part of this making this decision for this solution that they’re looking for. It’s so important to segment that out. Even for us, to have the decision maker as well as the direct influencers. So they feel like you’re talking to them in their language.

Liston: Absolutely. Yup, I agree.

Marylou: Where do we go from here? I’m so excited. What kind of services do you offer so if someone’s hearing this and thinking, oh, this is the holy grail for me. Where do they go? What do they do?

Liston: Just go to my website, servedontsell.com. Plenty of free resources for you there. I also have a podcast, Modern Sales, if you’re a podcast listener, which obviously you are if you’re listening to this. If you wanted more help from me, I have a course called The Sales Print which is a combination of some of the stuff I talked about here, but way more in depth. I also have a private coaching program, if you really, really want to figure out how to grow your service business.

Marylou: You’ve dangled the carrot with this 10 slide presentation. Is that in the training that you offer?

Liston: It is in the training, yes. Thank you for bringing that back. I appreciate that. Yeah, that’s in the training. That’s one of the modules, it is all around how to take all the information you gather throughout the sale, turn it into a deck, and present it. It’s often a game changer for service businesses if they can get their services on to a deck because it makes their sales more repeatable, capable of handing off and training other people on, and usually more profitable.

Marylou: I will attest to that because even in Predictable Prospecting, Jeremy wrote about, we called it a pitch deck as I said, but he wrote about putting together these decks that are short and sweet that cover. He put what he thought would be very good to have in the deck. I can tell you all, that when you start implementing those decks, practice them, role play them, and work through them, they are just winners all the way around. Your conversion rates are going to go up. It’s worth looking into this 10 slide pitch deck or deck because it’s going to help you organize your thoughts, it’s going to help you understand the rhythm and the flow of what you need to do for those four steps of drawing the map, of understanding the client’s motivation, of helping them make decisions, and then finally, showing what’s possible.

Boy, this has been a great conversation, Liston. Thank you so much for your time. I’ll make sure I put all your connections and all your links on the web page for people, so that they can learn more from you. Very much appreciate you spending time with us today.

Liston: It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me here. 

What is authentic persuasion? How do you build a rapport with a prospect? What does empathy have to do with making a sale? These are some of the questions that today’s guest will answer. Jason Cutter is the founder and CEO of Cutter Consulting Group and the author of the book Selling With Authentic Persuasion: Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker. Listen in to today’s episode to hear Jason talk about his book, the persuasion framework, and how to blend urgency, empathy, and rapport when talking to a prospect. 

Episode Highlights:

• How Jason came up with the title of his book
• Where to start becoming more authentic and persuasive
• How you add value in sales
• Where Jason was before he got into sales
• The sales success fundamentals that every sales conversation has to have
• The persuasion framework
• Methods for building rapport
• Active listening
• Blending urgency with rapport and empathy
• Finding out why the person wants to buy
• How intangibles factor into the sale
• What authenticity and persuasion have to do with the referral process
• Where listeners can learn more about Jason

Resources:

Jason Cutter

Cutter Consulting Group

Selling With Authentic Persuasion: Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker

Transcript

Marylou: Hey, everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Jason Cutter. He’s the founder and CEO of Cutter Consulting Group. We’ll talk about the variety of services he offers, which you guys will want to check out for sure.

What got me excited about this interview today was the title of his new book, which came out in August of 2020. It’s called Selling With Authentic Persuasion: Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker. That’s a tongue twister, Jason. I really love that term, authentic persuasion. First of all, welcome to the podcast. Secondly, can you tell me how you came up with that title? I love that title.

Jason: First, thank you for having me. It’s funny saying that is a tongue twister. I have said it enough times now, but in the beginning, I would get it backward—the order taker to quota breaker part. It took me a little while. 

Where did that come from? I was writing the book. Before it came out without a title, without really a specific goal in mind other than to get out of my head 17 years’ worth of experience that I felt could help people who went down a similar path as me where you didn’t plan on being a salesperson. You kind of stumbled into sales or defaulted in the sales. Then, here you are. Probably undertrained, under-coached, undermanaged, underlead, trying to figure it out, failing, and doing something else. 

That’s when I started writing the book. I had it written and it was edited. I thought, man, I don’t even have a title for this thing. I actually wrote it once, threw it away, wrote it a second time from scratch, and then still didn’t have a title. 

I had a mentor who came up with Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker and that was great, but it didn’t really help with the book. Then, one day, I was just like, I need a title. I don’t care. I was sitting on the floor at 6:30 AM in the morning. I started writing phrases and it jumped out. Five minutes later, I was buying domains on my phone on GoDaddy, then coming up with it, and did just like lightning speed from there.

Marylou: That’s wonderful. I love that term. As we were talking before we got officially started, I love the word authentic because it does represent where we are today and where we’ve been all the time—we’ve been selling. A good focus now, especially on authenticity. 

We have tools that are taking that human side. I have a colleague that is always talking about the fact that we’re losing the human touch because we have so many tools that allow us to have conversations—while we’re sleeping—with people. That term is really important to me. The two combined—authentic persuasion—because persuasion for me, especially top of the funnel, is where it’s all at.

We’ve all studied Cialdini, the principles of persuasion, and trying to encapsulate that into a sales conversation that resonates, that advances people into the pipeline. It has been almost like a lifelong study for me.

The fact that you put the two together, we just have to get your book. Walk us through the book. In the context of Authentic Persuasion, where do we start with you on this journey to become a better salesperson and a more authentic yet persuasive sales executive? How does it start?

Jason: When I wrote the book, I structured a certain way. And then when I realized Authentic Persuasion was the […] for it, I broke the book up into three sections. Section one is authenticity, section two is persuasion, section three is the intangibles. 

Just to clarify, I talked to a lot of people about this and some people say, I don’t like persuasion. They think persuasion is the same as manipulation, which it’s all about the intent. Some people are convinced. There are different words people can use. The concept is that the authentic piece is you, coming from a place that’s genuine and real for you, with the goal of wanting to help somebody else and be of service. Also—this is really where it’s important—it is understanding your fears, your limitations in your head, your strengths, and also why you want to be successful in sales. 

What would you put on the vision board? Why do you want it? Of course, everyone says, I just want to make more money. Why? Why do you want that money? The money’s just a vehicle for something. What is it that you want the money for? Maybe it’s not about the money, it’s because you want to help other people or there’s a different thing inside of you more intrinsically. The big thing is, if you’re not authentically, intrinsically motivated, then you’re going to need the carrot or the stick all the time. The sales are rough. 

When that 50th person says no for the day, are you going to pick up the phone and make the 51st call because the boss is standing over your shoulder threatening you or bribing you to close the deal? Or are you just going to do it because that’s what you want to do and for your own reason? That’s part of it. 

The persuasion piece is where it gets into a little more of the strategies. A lot of people want to go straight into strategies. Okay, tell me what I should say? How do I close deals? What do I do? That doesn’t matter until you have the authenticity piece set because maybe you’re parroting what somebody does. Grant Cardone or Gary Vee says this, so I’m going to try that. Unless it’s you and you know why you’re doing it, it doesn’t matter.

Marylou: Right. I definitely can see that even in my work, most people do know that I’m a sales process expert. There’s no word skill in the term sales process, but it does amplify and accentuate when we have skills—sales skills issue problems and also the mindset. The mindset, I think, is where you’re hitting with the authenticity piece.

I just had a conversation with a young sales executive the other day who is wanting to switch careers in sales because she was having difficulty waking up in the morning, getting excited about what she was selling. She didn’t believe in her heart of hearts that she was adding value.

Having that realization and coming to that was a very brave thing. She decided I’m going to switch careers and go into, in this case, life sciences because the firm that she decided to interview with is building applications to save lives. When you can get your arms around something that big—that’s bigger than you—then you wake up every morning and your question to yourself is, how can I add more value today? With whom can I have a conversation to add value? 

Is that what being authentic—that whole process is going through that mindset change of you’re here to serve, you’re here to help people. What you sell is valuable to the folks that you’re targeting in your target audience.

Jason: Yes. Like the person you were talking about, if you don’t see the value in it, you don’t believe in it, or you don’t see how that’s something you want to do, then do something else. Part of life is figuring out what you don’t want to do, just as much as figuring out what you do want to do. If you’re going to be selling something, helping somebody, and persuading them to take action, do you believe in what you’re helping them do? 

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people who get into sales. They usually are the ones that give sales the bad name and the bad connotation in the world. Why the public does not like salespeople or is guarded and worried about salespeople versus other professions. It’s because of salespeople who are just motivated by their own needs and making money. They don’t necessarily care what they’re selling. They don’t care what happens to their prospect. That’s not what matters at the end of the day. 

For me, it’s about people who want to do it and come from a place where they’re not sure how they can do it. That’s where we get into the persuasion piece, which is the framework for moving somebody forward. The big part of that—I’m sure you do this on your side. This comes down to persuasion and all those previous experts. But seeing it as your duty and responsibility such that I know I’m selling something of value. Where if I have the right person in front of me and they have problem X, I have solution X and they don’t buy, I’ve actually failed them.

Marylou: Right. We’re moving from authenticity in that section, the authenticity section is admitting or analyzing what fears we may have, what reservations, where we’re not necessarily confident, and focus on why we’re in this profession.

I just got a chuckle when you said that, like most people, you fell into selling. That is so true. I teach at university every once in a while here in Iowa and there are still no courses. Dallas, Texas has a nice school now, but there are no real, focused, concentrated courses on selling skills, selling mindset, process. We are kind of winging it when we go into a role in the hopes that people, the leadership there, will have an onboarding or ramping plan for us. Where were you before that guy that got you into sales?

Jason: Well, let’s see. My bachelor’s degree is in Marine Biology. I tagged sharks for years in Santa Cruz and Monterey Bay, which I know is where you’re from. I did that. I tell the story all the time because it’s an indication of where I’ve come to, why I think I can help people, and why I wrote the book. I grew up in an anti-sales household. 

My parents, great loving parents. My mom was a banker before she retired. My dad was an engineer and they moved their way up. My mom, her first job was at a furniture store. She used to sit in the back office and hear what the salespeople would say and do to customers. She vowed to never let that happen to our family. She was basically anti-salespeople. She just had to guard up. She hated them. She saw what they did—the people from the banking fraud side, and she would have it out for them. 

I grew up in that way, such that I would rather go tag sharks than deal with people. I literally didn’t want to get a job dealing with people. I kept doing it, but I didn’t want to. One thing led to another. That direction didn’t go in my life.

I ended up getting a job at Microsoft, doing tech support for a couple of years back when that was still done in the US. Then, we all lost our jobs to offshore outsourcing. That’s when a family friend said, hey, I got a guy. He’s growing a mortgage company. You could do that. It’s not that hard. It’s the 2002 housing market boom. I don’t consider that sales. I still screwed up a lot of stuff. Then, one thing led to another 18 years later.

Marylou: Here you are writing a book about your experiences. That’s the beauty of this. I think a lot of us could relate to the fact that we don’t necessarily intend to go into this profession. Some of us feel like they’ve been sucked into it. I certainly felt that way because I was one of those engineers coming from the engineering side. I was an operating system programmer for Honeywell and Xerox. I was definitely down in the bits and bytes of things. I could also speak to clients and prospects and understand what their technical issues were and communicate that back to the programming team.

I was always put into client-facing positions and I just hated it. Like you, I’m just not a real big people person. I thought, okay, since something is greater than me here, I’m going to have to explore this. I went into systems engineering. Now, that was fun. That was putting together the puzzles once the rep sold something to figure out. Can we really get this to work or not?

From there, we were moving from analog to digital since this back in the late ‘80s. They decided to fire all the salespeople because they weren’t technical enough to understand the analog to digital conversion strategies moving from 25 pairs of telephone cable down to a 2-pair digital cable. I was like, wave the magic wand over your head, Marylou. Now you’re in sales. That’s how I got in. I totally get it.

I had the authentic side because I really was a problem solver and still am. I’m very curious about why things don’t work or why things should be a little bit better than they are. I think that if I was in a situation where there was a high transaction volume, I would die on the vine. My whole thing has always been coming from relationship selling, multi-stakeholder, large accounts, which there were a lot of working parts. My engineering mind loves tinkering and loves all these disparate pieces that somehow piece together to make a whole. From there I study persuasion.

Let’s go into this persuasion piece. You said there’s a framework. How does that look? Where do you start with that? Are you looking at the person, the persona, the audience member? Where do you start with persuading people?

Jason: There’s what I call the sales success fundamentals that every sales conversation has to have. People use different terms, and there’s always these general things that I’ve seen.

Just to go back to your comment a minute ago, I think curiosity—especially from all the people that I’ve chatted with, other people that do what you and I do—is pretty much always the number one they throw out there as the trait for successful salespeople. I just think in general, somebody who is successful, not money, but just successful in having a purpose, bringing value to other people, and helping make things better in the world in general, curiosity, and then that problem-solving piece. 

Most people do what you and I did, which is we have that and we do it. For some reason, we have to do that now with people. Then, we figure out, wait, we can do that with people and it works pretty well. The thing going into the persuasion piece is the challenge is most people think of sales and they think of dirty word sales. They think of manipulation. They think of tricking. They think of memorizing sleek closing lines. Hey, Marylou, if I can show you a way to save $500 by Friday, is this something you’d be interested in doing? Yes, it could work, but it’s not what people want. 

The problem in people’s minds is they think that’s what sales is. When in fact your story epitomizes what sales should be. Which is you want to solve a problem, you’re curious, you want to help make things better, it happens to be with this human in front of you, and then, how can you do it and not make it feel like sales?

A lot of people are like, I don’t want to get in the sales. No, no, no. Don’t do “sales” like you think. This isn’t the Boiler Room or Wolf of Wall Street. Just actually help people, be a human, be a good person, and you’ll do really well. 

The persuasion framework for me—I’ve never come up with a better term for it. so I call it RETHU. Rapport, empathy, trust, hope, and urgency. Those five things in order and done completely. 

The problem with most salespeople—the sleek ones that we don’t like—is they start with urgency. It’s like, hey, you need to buy now. We’re having this. It’s this pressure, but there’s no rapport. There’s no empathy, which is the discovery process. There’s no trust built. It just seems inauthentic and seems bad. It seems wrong. 

Same thing with trust. A lot of salespeople go straight into trust, which is long monologues, which are big logos, which are testimonials and stories before the person even feels like you’re listening to them or you care.

You’ve got to do those phases. When you do that and you apply authentic persuasion to it, which is, this is my duty and responsibility, I have to help you. If I don’t help you, I’ve failed you. Then it shifts the conversation, which goes into the subtitle of the book, which is Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker. 

A lot of order takers do a great job with rapport, great job with empathy. They can build trust. The problem is, then, their main strategy’s help. Then, they’re just like, please buy from me. I hope you decide that you want to buy it. I’m here for you. I’m ready.

Marylou: Right, interesting. I’m trying to think because again, here I go with my process hat. I’m trying to understand because you said there’s the order. The first and foremost is building rapport, correct? 

Jason: Yup. 

Marylou: In building rapport, we’ve heard that term a lot. Is there a method that you can instantly align with that spits out rapport? Or, is rapport a natural part of you as a human? Can you practice rapport as a student of sales?

Jason: You can absolutely practice rapport building in sales, in life. For me, I use this tagline on my podcast all the time—everything in life is sales. Everything. Maybe you’re not even a salesperson, you work on a team. Maybe you’re a marketing person listening to this show. If you want your boss to agree with your marketing strategy or if you want the sales team to not think all of your leads suck, that’s all sales and persuasion around you at all times. 

I think rapport, the two biggest things I tell people to do is get better at being curious and segue that into being very ultra-interested. The reason why that is is because if you want people to be interested in you, you have to be interested in them. If you want them to find you interesting, then you first have to bring up things, ask questions, be curious, and then be interested and excited. When you do that, it makes people like you because you’re interested and you have things to talk about. 

You could do this at the store where you just ask somebody a question or seem interested in something they are doing, or you find something in common from an authentic place of actually being interested and being curious.

Marylou: It’s so funny you say this. I’m getting a flashback of my kids at the airport. I have the natural tendency to go up to strangers and as my daughter says, get in their business. From the mom’s point of view, me, it’s more about curiosity as to what brings you to the airport? Where are you traveling to?

It’s funny because they just shrink whenever I start down those conversation lines. I didn’t realize that I was practicing rapport the whole time. I am curious about what they’re doing. I’m very interested and not judgmental in any way, shape, or form. More like a sponge is taking in what their experiences are.

I have a friend who told me a story one time that he went up to someone and asked them what they did. That led to a 45-minute conversation. At the end of which, the man said to my friend, you are the most interesting person I’ve ever met. Literally, my friend just said, what do you do? That was it.

Jason: What people are really craving, in general—and if you apply this to your life and to your sales conversations, it’s a game-changer. What people want is somebody who actually cares, who’s interested, and then listens. I’m not going to blame social media for this, but I think it’s magnifying it. People don’t necessarily have to listen anymore. It’s a skill that’s not there. People are either too busy thinking about what they’re going to say next, they’re too busy waiting for you to stop talking so they can go do something else, or they’re multitasking. 

If you actually ask people questions, actively listen, then respond appropriately, and don’t make it about yourself—like my grandma used to say, two ears and one mouth. If you listen twice as much as you talk, people will think you’re the best person in the world. It will build rapport, empathy, and they will trust you with that. 

It’s funny you’re talking about your kids and you. Before I got into sales and really realized it, it used to drive me crazy too because I’d go out to dinner with my parents. My mom, a banker, doesn’t like salespeople, but she actually likes people and she’s just naturally curious. She likes to […]. 

We would go to a restaurant. By the time we were done, usually, the server would be sitting at the table with us, hanging out, ignoring all the other tables. My mom would know everything about that person—where they went to school, how they grew up, siblings, family, personal problems, finance. She would know everything. I would be so embarrassed, and me and my dad would look at each other. Then, I realized I have that same skill. Grocery store—it doesn’t matter, I’ll find out everything about somebody in five minutes.

Marylou: Yeah. It’s funny because it is a natural thing for me to do and I enjoy it. You meet all these very interesting people as a result. Applying that to the prospects, clients, and folks that we’re attempting to engage or persuade to get them to advance further into the pipeline, buy more products, or expand their usage. It is a trait that we as humans inherently know how to do. Maybe our muscles are a little weak in that area. Maybe we don’t have what I call endurance muscle of keeping and repetitively practicing that so you continually improve.

That’s rapport and empathy. How do we blend that into a nice mix of urgency?

Jason: We got the rapport, the empathy which I label as empathy because you want people to care about you, right? Going to the quote, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” You can’t build trust until someone feels like you actually care about them. You can, but it’s a rough game to try to do trust without the empathy part. 

Empathy is the discovery question. It’s probing. Again, like we just talked about. You ask questions, let somebody else talk. They will feel like you care even if you don’t say anything smart. They will feel like they can trust you. Then, we have trust.

Then, the hope is all about you having this problem, I have the solution, and it’s tailored to you because I asked you questions. Because I got to know you, I know you have this need. I have this specific solution. 

Now, if you don’t have that solution, I have a chapter in the book telling people, no, please. Tell them no and do the right thing for many reasons. It’s so important and it’s so valuable. A lot of salespeople are afraid to do that because of their scarcity mode. 

When you give them hope, it’s like, hey, you have this problem. Then the urgency is just that final piece, which the answer I’m going to say is pretty much always the answer now. The solution is now for whatever that step is. 

Now, if you’re talking about the long B2B sales cycle committee, they’ve got to go talk to somebody else. The time when they’ve got to go do something else in that sales conversation is now. We’ve got to do it right.

This is where salespeople come across under their own motivations, which is what repels people, the urgency is all about the other person’s need. It’s about that prospective customer’s need not your need. Not coming from a place like I got to close this deal at the end of the quarter or else. Coming from a place of 8 billion people on the planet. You buy, don’t buy. I’ve got enough other people to talk to. You need to buy for your reasons. I uncovered those, let me tell you why you need to do this right now.

Marylou: Then, make this the logical next step that says, here’s what I suggest. It’s like you’re going to the doctor almost where you go, my knee hurts. Tell me about where you were? What did you do? What kind of pain is it? Does it hurt here? You drill down to the core reason of what’s going on. Then, they prescribe the next step of that. If it makes sense, you’re going to jump at it. If it doesn’t, you’re going to ask more questions and work through it. That’s really how sales calls should go, especially at the top of the funnel. 

You’re really a detective trying to find out what’s going on or a doctor that’s trying to diagnose how acute your pain is. You can do so in a way that’s very endearing, but also is pleasantly persistent. I think that’s the type of thing, too, that I get a lot, is I don’t want to bother people or I feel like I’m bothering them. 

This persuasive section in your book talks about you not bothering people. You’re instead getting an understanding of where they are on the spectrum of making a decision that might be right for them now. It’s okay, like you said, if it’s not a good time now, maybe someday it will be. Let’s keep in contact because things change. You never know.

I think a lot of times, reps have this hope thing going on. The hope of, if I can just say the right thing, it’s going to convince them now. I think that’s not a good way to organize your business and organize your flow of conversations. There are going to be, as we all know, a large number of people who aren’t ready yet. They’re not there yet. I respect that, work with that, and suggest some alternatives for them. 

All in all, you do have to go through that process. I appreciate you articulating it that way. To me, it’s like this big blob. I don’t know the order in which and if you do it naturally, that’s the hardest part of trying to figure out how to teach others. Now, where do I start? I very much appreciate you putting it into a framework like that. It’s great.

Jason: Yeah. To your pestering comment, to me, two things happen when people feel like they’re pestering and then they fall under this order taker category that I would say. One is they’re selling crap that people don’t need or want.

I am speaking specifically, including B2B, SAAS, and all of those companies. This isn’t just consumer crap that people don’t need. I mean business crap because you’re the 19th CRM that somebody isn’t going to use, and you think it’s the best CRM on the planet. But it’s either not, it’s not a good fit, or you don’t believe it. Now, there are ways to innovate and improve. I think a lot of people are starting things and selling things that nobody cares about or wants. That’s part of it. 

The other part is people usually feel like they’re a pest—pestering somebody and chasing somebody because they don’t actually know why that person wants to buy. That’s the biggest game-changer. If you actually know why that person wants or needs what you have, then in your follow-ups, it’s very specific. Hey, we talked, you told me this. We were going to help solve this, when can we talk more about it? Now, I’m trying to help you with that. I think that’s so huge. 

It’s funny talking about your doctor example because that’s what I talk about all the time and related to that, especially when it’s your responsibility. I think that’s a strong corollary for people to treat their role like a professional role, especially in sales, is to mimic what happens.

If you break your leg and you go into the emergency room, the doctor wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t do the exam, take X-rays, run the tests, come back, and say, hey, here’s the X-ray. It looks like your leg is broken. Let me know what you want to do about it. I’ll send you a follow-up email. Here’s my card. I also have a brochure about broken legs. Here, take this. You know what I’ll do, let’s reconnect next week, let’s chat again and see if this is something you want to get taken care of. It’s like, no, no, no. They went through that process.

You’re here. The doctor instead says, your legs are broken. Here’s the diagnosis. We need to fix it. Any questions? Okay, hold on. This is going to hurt, but then you’ll get better. When you do that, it makes that huge shift.

Marylou: Yeah. It gets down to the root cause of what’s really bothering them. Another example for me would be my lead generation program doesn’t work. That could mean 100 different things. We learned root cause analysis when I was in engineering. That’s a similar process for asking questions to get down to the bare bones of what is causing them pain, unwanted outcomes, risks, obstacles, or whatever it is that you need to get down to that level. At the same time, as you said when you were asking those questions, they’re thinking, boy, they really understand what I’m going through.

I’ve had a lot of people say, you really know my thing, don’t you?

Jason: Yeah. Usually what happens is they’ve had some bad experience where they ask lots of questions. Then, somebody rejected them and said, you don’t need to know all this stuff. Just tell me how you’re going to help me. Then, it imprinted in their mind. Or, they flashback to when they were a teenager and they started liking that new boy or girl. At the dinner table, the parents are just grilling them. It feels like grilling. They’re not, it’s just asking questions. 

You think I don’t want to do that to other people because I hate when people are nosy in my business. That makes you a superficial salesperson because you don’t actually know what the other person wants or needs.

Marylou: Exactly. We’ve been through authenticity and persuasion. You mentioned there’s the last section on, what you say, intangible. Tell us about that. That sounds interesting too. Very interesting terms and phrases. For the curious self, you’re like, what does that mean?

Jason: I wish I could say I was a very smart marketer and I just came up with this thing to help sell more. It’s no. I’m so authentic. It just comes to me and I just do it. Intangibles, for anyone that’s a fan of sports or familiar with sports, intangibles are usually those little things that somebody does where it’s not tracked, it’s not measured. 

In sports, I’m more of a basketball fan. The hustle plays, the getting in people’s way, the mind games—all those are weird intangibles that don’t show up on a stat sheet. It’s the difference between winning and losing against a professional. I’m a professional basketball player. You’re a professional basketball player. I got to get an edge. The way to get an edge is intangible. 

What most salespeople don’t realize is that you are playing against a professional—your customer—who’s way better at being themselves and not buying than you have been so far on your experience because everyone has that primal part of their brain, the amygdala, which still thinks it’s 10,000 years ago on the Savanna. That if you eat the wrong berry, it will kill you or there’s a saber-tooth tiger trying to kill you. 

You’re playing against a professional, which is this unconscious mind that’s so tough to crack because it doesn’t like change. Change equals death. Intangibles are these little things. Now, one intangible that order takers do a lot, for example, is they pause. I’m not talking like the strategic pause, like, okay, Marylou, it’s going to be $30,000, pause. I’m not talking about that strategic negotiation pause. 

I mean, you asked me a question, I answered, and then I pause and I leave this vacancy. Nature hates a vacuum. What happens is your prospect, who’s scared—if they weren’t scared, they would have bought it already. The fact that they haven’t bought means there’s something you have to overcome.

In that vacuum, your prospect will come up with another question and another question and order takers pause instead of going back to where they were or transitioning. They lose control and then they lose the whole thing. It’s one of those things where I can listen to anybody’s conversation and tell if they tend to be more of an order taker just based on things like that. If you do that, it just signals the other person is in control. 

Most mediocre salespeople who aren’t getting the results they want, they’re not good enough to wrestle back the control. I call it a death by a thousand punches. They just end up getting knocked out. That’s it.

Marylou: Right. That’s a skill that definitely you can practice. We’ve had a lot of interviews lately with some people and we’ve thrown those curveballs at them. It’s been interesting to see how many people can get us back on track versus going down the rabbit hole of the curveball with us. That’s very interesting. I like that. 

The other thing that hit me when you said about basketball, there’s a famous saying from Wayne Gretzky, who’s a hockey player, that he, “Skates to where the puck is going,” (I think is how he says it) instead of where the puck is. That, to me, is a big intangible because that’s what sets him apart. It’s not measured, but it’s something that definitely sets him apart. He’s one of the greatest hockey players of all time.

Jason: Yeah. There was some miscellaneous stuff that wouldn’t fall under the persuasion that I put in the intangibles. It’s saying no when you need to tell somebody no. For the right reasons, it’s the referral game and all those things. That’s really the difference. The difference between highly effective sales professionals is those intangibles because the rest of it’s just a process.

Marylou: Yeah. You mentioned early on about referrals, did you put that in the intangibles area?

Jason: It is, yup.

Marylou: Okay. That’s a big thing now because of COVID. We’re right in the middle of a pandemic as we’re having this conversation. There are certain channels of contact that just went away from us. Building your network out and relying on people to assist you in the process is always welcomed, especially now. With GPR, we’re getting a lot now into these do not contact protocols, especially in Europe, that are basically cutting our arm off when it comes to channels of reaching out to people like the phone versus email.

I think referrals are a big thing. I’m curious as to what authenticity and persuasion have to do with the referral process?

Jason: Well, part of the challenge is that most people in sales that I’ve experienced who are struggling. There are the people who aren’t struggling and they’re doing great. They’re operating like professionals. Then, there are the ones who are struggling and they’re too short-term focused to have the relationships that then lead to referrals. I don’t mean the sales cycle. I just mean in general. It’s like I need this deal now and I’m going to do whatever it takes to get this now. 

Again, a primal part of our brain, 10,000 years ago—wake up hungry, you need to eat today or you might starve to death. What do I have to go get? For the referral side, under authentic persuasion, it’s really about acting like a hunter but think like a farmer. You can’t also just rely on a pure farming referral strategy. Most people can’t because you plant those seeds. It takes a long time to grow. You’re going to starve to death before it’s time to pick an apple off of that tree. You’ve got to do both, but you’ve got to make your sales. 

If you do it in a proper way that’s relational, like you talked about a while ago, then you’re building these relationships which then have the value and you underpromise, over-deliver. As a salesperson, you set the right expectation and your company actually fulfilled what you said they would do, which a lot of salespeople that’s not what happens. They either ignore some facts or they promise the moon and you’re not going to get referrals that way. It’s really about doing both short- and long-term.

Marylou: Wonderful. The book is Selling With Authentic Persuasion: Transform from Order Taker to Quota Breaker. Jason, thank you so much for your time. I’m going to be putting all your links because you have a bunch of different services you offer.

If you’d like to talk about that a little bit about how people can get in touch with you and what kind of services that you provide to help us be better at our profession that we all love?

Jason: I appreciate that. I’ve made it easy. If you go to jasoncutter.com, it’s a hub for everything that I have. I’m very active on LinkedIn. If you want to see content there. I have the book, which is on authenticpersuasion.com, also on Amazon. 

I have my consulting side where I could help organizations improve their sales process, build sales processes, and just create winning teams of quota breakers instead of order takers. You can find that through there.

I also work with individual sales reps and managers to help them become more effective.

Marylou: Wonderful. Again, thank you so much for your time. We very much appreciate you sharing your work with us.

Guys this is a great book to add to your arsenal (if you will) or your toolkit of sales books. Like anything, we can always get better, more confident, and more secure in our selling strategies, our selling methodologies, our skills, and our mindset. It does take that holistic approach of mindset, skillset, and as Jason said, process, in order to be able to maximize your return on effort, take that hour and multiply your results.

Thanks so much, Jason, for being a guest today on our podcast. 

Marylou: Thanks for having me, Marylou.

What do you know about team selling? What are the advantages to approaching sales from a team position? In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Trish Bertuzzi, founder and CEO of The Bridge Group and author of The Sales Development Playbook. Listen in to hear what Trish has to say about what team selling models look like, what the benefits of the team selling approaches are, and how you can start thinking about team selling as an option in your business.

Episode Highlights:

• What team selling means
• What a team selling model looks like
• Hybrid roles
• How to start looking at team selling as an option
• Different versions of team selling
• Developing a team sales strategy that makes sense for you
• What account hierarchy looks like
• The continuity of team selling
• What you can learn from being part of a team
• Why you need to think differently about your selling model
• Where sales goes from here

Resources:

Trish Bertuzzi

The Bridge Group

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is none other than Trish Bertuzzi. She’s the founder and CEO of The Bridge Group. She’s been around for a while, just like I have. She also is the author of The Sales Development Playbook. That was written a couple of years after Predictable Revenue was written in 2011. 

I’ve been following her work for some time. I saw a blog post on LinkedIn where she referred to a term called team selling. That got me super interested, as a lifelong learner. Also, being in sales now for 30-some odd years. I had heard that term when I originally worked back in 1981 at Xerox. I was curious about what Trish had to say about this topic.

This week’s episode is giving us an insight into how she’s refraining the term team selling, some option you may want to consider. Also, letting you know that she’s going down this rabbit hole and learning about how to apply this in today’s selling environment.

I felt that it was really important that you listen to this particular podcast knowing that it’s bubbling up. It’s percolating. It’s not something that we put into action, try to scale or things like that. It’s allowing us to think outside that box of the traditional, transactional, assembly-line–type of selling where we have people doing business development, who hand off opportunities to quota-caring or to field salespeople—whatever you want to call them—direct sales.

It’s giving you another idea of how to look at this. Please, take a listen to this week and let Trish know. She’s on LinkedIn all the time. She’d love to connect with you and find out your experiences of playing around with these configurations for sales, what’s working and not for you. In a moment, Trish.

Trish: Thank you. Team selling has been around forever. I think it was the early 90s I was in a team selling role. When I use the term team selling, I don’t mean a pod. I have to be honest, I’m not a fan of pods, and I have good research to show that pods really don’t add much more value. To me, they’re a lot of work and they don’t really get you that much more. 

Having said that, when I started talking about team selling, I got a lot of comments on LinkedIn, so I picked seven or eight people. I said, all right, talk to me about your experiences. I think much as I would love there to be one definition of it or one potential implementation, there could be multiple. Let’s take them one at a time. 

My vision first, because, of course, I’m always first. When I talk about team selling, I don’t mean the SDR. I mean team selling, like partnering with an inside rep and a field rep. It’s ridiculous because they’re both virtual now, but I don’t know how else to articulate it. When partnering with sellers in a geo or territory or however it’s structured with shared goals and objectives, there’s your number, team. You need to go make that number. But also providing them with some level of corporate focus. 

For instance, lots of people have a solution that can be sold to many different tiers of companies. Your ASP for under 10,000 employees is $40,000 and your ASP for over 10,000 employees is $250,000. Look at the territory. Tear it out and say to the, I’m going to use the term field seller for lack of a better term, you’re responsible for going after employee count 10,000 and above because we’re making the assumption that there’s going to be bigger deals. Inside sales rep, you’re responsible for going after 10,000 and below because we assume it’s going to be a lower ASP. 

But in reality, what happens is you can be going after that smaller account and say, whoa, I can make this deal huge. If you’re not in a team selling model, your inside salesperson is going to try to tackle that themselves. Are they the best person to do that alone? Probably not. In this version of team selling, they bring in their field partner to help. No harm, no foul. Two resources is better than one, […] sale price—you get where I’m going. 

On the flip side of the coin, the field seller is an employee 10,000 and above account. They’re never going to spend more than $40,000. Well, rather than chase it when he could be chasing bigger deals, he gives it to his partner. Partner works it, they work it as a team thing, biggity baggity boom. It’s a thing of beauty. In that version, it’s about applying the right resource to the right sales process. How does the SDR fit into it? It all depends. It’s not what I was talking about when I was talking about team selling, but yeah, they have shared goals and objectives.

Marylou: Again, SDR sales, business development, account development, whatever it is, there seemingly are still those people who like to get conversations started and warmed up. There are those people who like to take those warm conversations and get them further into the pipeline. Now, that’s similar to that pod concept that we were talking about. 

What also intrigues me about what you’re talking about, what I’m running into now, because I’m in the field right now working for a client full time in Denmark, we have an existing client base. There are areas where we can expand either usage or penetration within the base itself in that client. Then, there’s this net new where there could be new money centers or new logos that were also targeted within that bubble, that same team. 

We see the combination of skill set that the account or business developer is better at that endurance muscle of warming people up, that they can also take care of the base if they’re knowledgeable enough. We’re looking for people who are not only good endurance muscle, for that workflow and habit of connecting, but also, they have to be well versed in the products and services that we’re selling in order to be able to expand, increase the penetration, and usage. That’s what I’m seeing now as part of this team, what we call a team.

Trish: That’s more of a hybrid role than doing a traditional SDR role. The challenge is they’re going to fall back on their comfort level. If I’m an SDR and I am not comfortable getting into negotiation, objection, handling, competitive positioning, delivering, pricing, I’m just going to go have my little initial conversations. Or if I think I’m a hotshot and I think I can close a lot of deals, I’m not going to prospect. I’m going to chase every deal, crappy or not, and try to close it because that’s my preference.

I like hybrid roles. You just really have to pay attention to them, make sure that they’re well managed. I think that potentially is the next evolution of what an SDR, ADR, BDR could be. It just has to be really well-managed.

Marylou: And the comp plans. We have the wildest comp plan now that we’re working on it. It’s not in stone yet, but we’re trying to get an understanding of client value. For example, it’s not only average deal size, it’s the market share we’re trying to go after to build our book. We’re trying to add in a point system where if you’re in this customer base with this customer type, then you’re going to get more points as we progress into the funnel than if you go after the kind of bread and butter we know we can close them kind of accounts because we’re looking to open up our market share. 

I’m seeing that this role and these combinations of skill sets is ebbing and flowing. It’s interesting to see it’s not as segmented as it used to be. That’s for sure. I’m actually getting people who were account executives who want to come and do this thing what we’re calling a hybrid (like you said), that they can take it not only to a qualified opportunity, which is the old fashioned model, but they march into the funnel maybe 25%, 35%, 50% probability, but still can’t do the closing. Still needs the body to come in, negotiate contracts, just look at that whole purchasing side of things. 

When you said that about the team, I’m just trying to figure out, we can’t really delineate a marker that says you go up to here and then someone else takes it. What you said is depending on the deal. The deal drives the resources.

Trish: I couldn’t have said that better myself. The deal dictates the sales resource applied to the deal. 

Marylou: Got it. That is one balance of what those deals look like in that territory. Are you saying that these people are now all of a sudden account planners? They actually look at their territory and try to break it up into a manageable piece? How would I go about beginning to look into this as an option for my team?

Trish: It has to be a corporate strategy. It’s not that the team itself is identifying tier one and tier two accounts. That has to be done at the corporate level through sales and marketing, developing their ideal customer profile, tearing people as appropriate, giving point systems—I like that idea, actually—whatever the case may be, it’s not something the team has to figure out. 

Where team selling will go awry, like if you have 10 teams selling in your company and they have 10 different strategies going, you’re screwed. It has to be a corporate strategy that you’re executing.

The beauty of inside sales is it doesn’t have to be one-to-one. You can have a one-to-two ratio, with one inside seller focused on those accounts, with two senior sellers focused on the rest. It’s still shared goals and objectives with a buffer.

Marylou: Yeah. You even said […] experts we’re finding. We have a clinical side of life and then we have a research side of life in my current world. We’re awaiting now FDA approval for the clinical in the United States. We’re grabbing those resources and starting to filter into America’s side of life. With COVID now, we don’t have to worry about traveling where everybody’s figuring out how to virtually support one another. All of a sudden we feel like we have this bigger team. We have this new team all the way around. It’s just now that people are not so focused on certain geographies. They’re looking at the subject matter in order to organize.

Trish: Okay, a different version of team selling.

Marylou: Oh, my God. You better write a book on this then.

Trish: I’m never writing a book again; maybe I’ll write an ebook. So, different versions of team selling. I talked to some companies that are doing really interesting things. They’re not calling them pods. They are partnering sellers with domain experts on subject matter experts, technical experts, with sharing. Everybody gets paid off revenue, though. 

Marylou: Right. That’s how we’re organized.

Trish: I love that. Everyone gets paid off revenue. In one of my interviews—I actually think it was yesterday; he said I can’t say who he is yet—this model—listen to this, listen to how brilliant this is; brilliant—he says if you’re selling to large companies, and you’re selling to the head of HR—chief people officer—the best thing you could ever do would be to hire someone that used to have that role. Pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to not just be your domain expert, to work with marketing and say, “That messaging would never have worked with me. Here’s why,” to work with your product team and go, “Yeah, that’s neither a bell nor a whistle. That’s nothing. Don’t waste your time developing that,” to work with the executive team and a content team, to make sure you’re on top of trends. Oh my gosh. Everyone selling into the enterprise should do that. Why don’t we do that? I don’t know.

Marylou: We used to do that back in the days of Xerox selling. I’m dating myself to 1985. That’s how we learned. That is the book. The SMEs were the ones who went out—we were face-to-face back then; we didn’t have the Internet yet—and that’s the way we did it. I’m happy to hear that these things are starting to come around.

Trish: But just to make sure that I articulated clearly, this very senior resource doesn’t necessarily engage with customers, but he engages within the organization to make sure the organization is current on what’s going on. 

Marylou: Yeah. In our world right now, people we bring in from the industry who were pathologists or scientists, who actually are doing the workflow, know the challenges, know the unwanted outcomes, know the risks, we’re trying to mitigate those risks by having those people come and tell us, don’t bother wasting your time here because this is where the real issues are.

We have them actually working with our product people, even. Not just marketing and sales but product to make sure that our roadmap is such that we’re meeting the needs beyond the expectations, so we’re not the ‘me, too’ company. 

Trish: Here’s what I want to make sure people understand. I’m not running around saying, you have to have SDRs. They have to be really specialized. I don’t look at everyone and go, pod, pod, pod. You really have to understand your own business and develop a sales strategy that makes sense for you. 

One of the things that’s remained consistent over the last few months when I’ve talked to buyers—I probably do three or four sales calls a day; that’s how I learned so much from the actual practitioners—is we need to go upstream. They always needed to go upstream, but they could have lived off SMB. Well, SMB got decimated by COVID. Mid-market’s struggling, so everybody wants to go up to the enterprise. Guess what? That is a whole different way to sell. 

What I’m saying to these people is do not take what you were doing in the SMB and mid-market and slap dab it over here […] until you make your way through this pivot.

Marylou: Yeah. I came the other way. I came from large business sales. I had six clients with a  $2-million-quarterback in 1987. Six, that’s large accounts trying to go from that to medium size and then to small. I understand exactly what you’re saying. The rules of engagement are very different between each of these levels. In fact, Predictable Revenue was written as a book that talked about Salesforce when it was selling to mom and pop flower shops and how they tried to move upmarket. That little book was the case study of what we do to move up the market. Add if anything, this is a continual […] just don’t get.

Trish: Evolve or die.

Marylou: Exactly. Let’s get back to the team itself. You said the deals and the market drive. 

Trish: I’m experimenting with different scenarios. There was one scenario. Let the account dictate the sales resource […]. Another scenario is the one we just talked about with partnering domain experts, technical experts, having a really different type of selling experience, where maybe the seller is more an orchestra leader until he’s really needed than anything else. There’s that. 

Then, there’s also a team selling land and expand. Everyone says they do that really well. I haven’t seen a lot of people do that really well because they’re still handing the baton over. I know we have hunters and farmers, but why do we build a big wall between them? Why can’t we have hunters and farmers in the same territory with shared goals and objectives?

Marylou: Yeah. I think the concept of the pod was supposed to be to put everybody in one big little umbrella, underneath one umbrella. Once an account was sold, the eight-year sales developer, the field person as you call them, […] the net new, new money centers, new logos. Once it was closed, they’d hand it off to the account manager types. They were usage and expansion and trying to build out loyalty. That was their main roles. We can’t afford to lose people now that we’ve got them under our fold. In practice, it’s very difficult.

Trish: Yeah, it’s a lot harder. Once again, you have to also think through, who am I landing and how far am I expanding?

Marylou: The tiers of accounts should help drive, is this a multi-global, multi-branch–oriented type of account or is there one instance of it? What does my account hierarchy look like? 

You can help a lot with the list and set up the actual map. For team selling, as an example, do you get involved with how you orchestrate the map of accounts and whether or not there are multiple business centers and all of that?

Trish: I am early in my journey of bringing back teams selling. I will tell you that the keys to the kingdom in that mapping is great data. Okay, who has it? Nobody. I always think of people. The number one lever you can pull for productivity and revenue is data. Invest your money there, give up headcount for data. Everyone’s like, oh, it’s so boring. I’m like, it’s so necessary though.

Marylou: Oh my gosh. We all live by your annual reports which are data-driven insights that allow us to execute with more quality and better conversion rates.

Trish: By the way, […] will come out hopefully in 30 days. It just depends. We, the Bridge Group, don’t profess to be data analysts. That is total geek, but that’s a whole separate issue. He’s geeking on our report. Bringing in real, real data analysts to make sure you have accurate data and that you’re analyzing it correctly, I think that’s a wonderful investment that more companies should definitely make.

Marylou: Yeah. Now, with the systems all disparate, you have to have an outbound touch system that you’re using for this cadence, in that multi-touch, multi-channel. Then, you have an inbound system that you’re collecting, people who you’re attracting. Then, you have the CRM, which is like the mothership database thing. Yeah, there are a lot of systems now you also need to connect up, which is another issue with data. It is trying to get a full report of the entire pipeline.

Trish: That’s why RevOps is one of the hottest jobs there is now. A couple of years ago, marketing ops was the hottest job. Well, now it’s RevOps, the hottest jump because of these issues. People are saying, I’m looking for a RevOps person. Well, I think you have to grow your own because there aren’t that many great ones out there. Yeah, hot job.

Marylou: Definitely. We got the two models. What else have you discovered in your journey of talking to a ton of people about this? Any other insights that you want to share with us?

Trish: Yeah. People are struggling to pivot. They’re like, that sounds like a really good idea. I’m scared. No. What we’re saying to people is, don’t be scared, pilot. Pilot, enough to generate. You don’t pick up your whole strategy and move it over here. Pilots are a thing of beauty. Absolutely, a thing of beauty. You don’t pilot with your worst teams. You pilot with your best teams because they’re the people who get it. We’re just starting to talk to people about piloting these things so we can collect some more data. 

Marylou: Some more intel. Yes, I’m a fan of ramping. Definitely a fan of proof of concept, then ramp and scale based on that. We usually pick those areas of growth that if we need to go backward, we’re okay. Like we had to do with COVID. We had the phone. It was our main source of reaching people. Overnight, it was gone. Overnight, we realized, […] order numbers. We don’t have direct information. No one is there.

Trish: But it’s back. The phone is back for sure.

Marylou: You’re right. Finding a spot in your company where you think that this would work, we’ve seen the value of what I call going backward to the old ways of selling where we had a more value-driven approach and we took our time to build the relationship. Sometimes with the medium-sized businesses, relationships play a bigger part than the transactional, the smaller ones.

Trisha: Well said. 

Marylou: Yeah. especially this thing called lifetime value. The churn aspect of medium-sized enterprises, it’s devastating when you lose too many of those after all the work you put in to get them.

Trish: Here’s another benefit to team selling. You and I are selling partners. We’re selling some great accounts. We’re cranking along. I leave. Not team selling, those relationships…

Marylou: Gone.

Trish: Whaddup, right? Continuity is another blessing with team selling.

Marylou: I know it’s early on, but what about attrition?

Trish: You’re always going to have attrition, so that’s not going to change. You’re going to have attrition. You’re going to have chemistry issues. We’re talking humans interacting with humans. There’s going to be a whole bunch of funky issues. You’re always going to address that. 

I actually wrote something that I firmly believe in 2014, about if you’re doing something like this you need to have ranger reps. A ranger rep is someone you drop in when you have attrition. You’re inside sales rep leaves and two field partners don’t have anyone to partner with. Drop-in a ranger rep. Or a field person. Drop-in a ranger rep. They’re super senior. They love the challenge of jumping in with both feet. You pay them through the nose because they are worth their weight in gold. Why don’t we all do this? I don’t know.

Marylou: I think a lot of it is just our awareness around how these teams function effectively and efficiently. There’s a, not a huge learning curve, but there’s a learning curve here if you weren’t selling in the olden days. This is a precursor. You’re making it better, obviously, but this was a precursor to how we used to do it.

Trish: All you gray hairs out there that have been selling since the 80s. We’re back.

Marylou: I love the idea of leveraging technology where we can. I don’t know about you. If you remember those SDRs books that we used to go to the library and find leads, these big old books. We can leverage technology to help us have better conversations. We can leverage it to find how we should organize these teams because we have better market research. That’s not $5 million to get anymore. Someone with a good query tool or a good use of the Internet can find out a lot of information online that was never available.

Trish: In my first job in sales, I worked for IDC and I sold something called their computer installation data file. People would buy these reams of paper from me that told them where mainframes were installed so they could go sell them other stuff. I remember going to shipping and just shipping reams of paper. My CRM was a three-ring binder. 

Marylou: Yeah, mine was a Rolodex. Literally.

Trish: We’re so old. We need to stop talking about this. 

Marylou: The concepts are the same. When it’s time to call, it used to be waiting in the parking lot with the cup of coffee for the CEO to arrive. It’s still the same concept of catching people when they’re doing whatever they’re doing. When they’re in their office when they would be more likely to answer the phone.

Trish: Yeah, I’m huge on mobile. There are some great data providers out there who are doing a great job of providing mobile numbers. It’s not before you call people on mobile. Now, it’s our world. 

Marylou: Yeah, totally. I have a client that I know now and I get these texts. I know to key in STOP. That means I get off their list. If memory serves, we have the do not call list and there were some standard codes that you can use in texting. I’m finding out if you don’t want unsolicited texts and things. I think you’re right. All of these are attributes that you want to put into play when you’re building your team. How do your people, your audience, like to communicate? How can you best use each other’s talents to advance things in the pipeline? Should there be a D mark or not? Should you tag team it?

We were talking before, I was a BDR—Business Development Rep—for three […]. Their average size was $250,000. Some people wanted a full qualification. Basically, they wanted to just write the order. There were some people who said, I don’t care, Marylou, find the money or not. I’ll find it. I know how to build a sense of urgency. 

I think that’s what you learn as being in a team where each of you can rise to the occasion and handle certain parts of the sale instead of it being so rigid the way predictable revenue was, where you hand it off and you’re sayonara.

Trish: Yeah. If I could say anything to your audience, it would be this. It’s time to think differently. Things are different. The world is a different place and it’s not going back. Think differently about your model. Don’t bring what you did at the last company forward to this company and think it’s going to work. Don’t go on to one of these sales communities and say, what should my sales strategy be? And 50 people who don’t even ask you a question start telling you what your sales strategy should be.

You really need to get together as a team and think it through, like what is the best way? Here’s the hardest question. It is the first question I ask people to answer and they struggle with it. It is, where do you want your revenue to come from? Then, like, well, we’re a horizontal plane. I’m like, wrong answer. Where do you want your revenue to come from? You keep asking yourself that question as an organization until you can answer it with incredible specificity. You have the answer, then go build your strategy.

Marylou: I can relate to that. I have something called the revenue quadrant. That thing is, are we in existing clients or new clients? Are we selling existing products or new products? There are four boxes that you fill in. We ask, okay, for this fiscal year, what’s the percentage? What’s the split of those four quadrants? By the way, what’s the revenue we’re trying to get in each of those four quadrants? Most of my clients don’t know that answer.

Trish: Obviously, you expressed it much more articulately than I did. Yes, I would agree with you. It’s a hard question to answer, but you’re going nowhere until you answer it.

Marylou: To your point, if you have been in business, you have the data that you can least point to as a baseline. It may be completely wrong if you got crappy data, but it’ll get you further than just guessing or gut. 

I try to get people away from the gut and more to data-driven if I can. Once we start executing, then everything starts to fall into place. Oh, we’re 95% to base. Oh, okay. For a 95% base and 5% net new market share growth, then that’s a whole different style of person we really need. But if we’re 70% new, 30% existing, then we need some good persuasive folks in there who can build that sense of urgency. Why change? Why now? Why us? That’s a whole different setup. I love that you say where are you? Where are you on this map?

What’s next? Where do we go from here, Trish? 

Trish: Oh, I don’t know. I’m just waiting for it to be wind time.

Where do we go from here? I don’t know. I’m still exploring. I am going to share ideas on LinkedIn, which is my platform of choice, only because I get so much great feedback from there. Anyone who’s interested in this topic, feel free to contribute. That is how I learn. I do not have all the answers, but I do have a lot of the questions.

Marylou: You have a lot of questions that get people to think and think outside the box, as they say. Kind of think about the new normal. What does that look like? 

Trish: What does it look like for you?

Marylou: Yeah, […].

Trish: Yeah, no frameworks. Don’t take someone else’s framework and slap it down on what you’re doing. Custom. The more custom you get, the better off you’re going to be.

Marylou: Where do we reach you? LinkedIn? The Bridge Group? […] the report pretty soon, right?

Trish: Yeah, I hope so. We are, Matt, right? If you’re listening. It should be coming out. LinkedIn’s the best. I’m so easy to reach.

Marylou: It’s nice, I really enjoy it. I don’t get on that very often, but when I do, you’re always front and center, so it’s a good thing.

Trish: Here’s the thing. People were like, you’re always on there. I’m like, no, I’m only there when I’m eating. If you see a post from me, I was eating.

Marylou: Here we go. Best time to LinkedIn with Trish. 

Trish: There you go. Yeah. 

Marylou: Thank you so much for being a guest. It’s been so great to talk to you. We haven’t talked with each other forever.

Trish: Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. I think the last time we were together was a Dreamforce and you had a broken leg, maybe?

Marylou: My knee, yes. I was in a cast and you were gracious and gave me a ride to the event. Otherwise, I was on my crutches. It was a nightmare.

Trish: Not an event that I would miss. How about you?

Marylou: I haven’t been to anything lately.

Trish: Yeah, well, there’s nothing to go to, but yeah. That’s one that I’m not missing.

Marylou: Yeah, me too. I’m pretty well spoken for over the next few years with this company in Europe, so I’m trying to get them to go public. Danish public, which I know nothing about the Danish Stock Exchange, so this will be interesting. 

Very good. Well, you take care. Thank you so much for being with us today. 

Trish: My pleasure. Bye, now.

Marylou: Bye.

Following up is a vital part of the sales process that is often overlooked. Are you following up when you should be? What are the best strategies for following up? What method of follow up is most popular – and is the most popular method really the best method? To learn more, listen to today’s episode in which you’ll hear from Jeff Shore, who’s recently released a book geared toward giving you the information that you need to know about the importance of and best practices for follow up.

Episode Highlights:

• Why Jeff wrote his new book, Follow Up and Close the Sale
• How the book is organized
• What follow up isn’t
• What follow up is for
• How follow up shows customers how much we care
• The strategy of follow up
• Why email shouldn’t be the number one method of follow up
• Jeff’s definition of the lead conversion hour
• How to get immersed in the follow up process
• The story of Bill Porter
• The knee of the curve

Resources:

Follow Up and Close the Sale: Make Easy (and Effective) Follow-Up Your Winning Habit

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest, you guys are going to love because you know that I get very hyperventilating over this thing called follow-up. There’s now a book that talks about follow-ups soup to nuts, and is written by Jeff Shore who is our guest today. He’s written a book called Follow-up and Close the Sale: Make Easy (and Effective) Follow‑Up Your Winning Habit. 

Jeff is also a speaker and author. He has a website, I’ll make sure I put all of that in the show notes for you. The key here is that he has been doing this for 30 plus years. He is the go-to guy. I think with the follow-up potential that I know you all have but maybe haven’t developed that endurance muscle, this book will help you get on track and help you get to the point where you do this thing called follow-up on either an everyday basis, a couple of times a week, or whatever it is that fits into your pipeline objectives. 

He’s the man, and he’s here to talk to us about this book. I’m so happy that this book has been written. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff: Thank you very much. Let’s have some fun.

Marylou: Okay, let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about the book. First of all, why? Why now? Why did you write the book? You’ve been doing this for 30 years. What happened in your life that you said, okay, trigger event, it’s time to do this book for people? 

Jeff: There are a couple of answers to that question. One is if you go on Amazon and you type in sales follow-up, you’ve got pretty sparse in what you’re going to find there as far as resources. A lot of people have spoken about it. I certainly know you have—many great people over the years. People write blog posts and articles, but there hasn’t been that just that one spot where you can get it all together.

The other reason—which is definitely more speaking into the psychology, mind-first, and then to the readers—is that a lot of salespeople don’t think of follow-up. Whether that’s a pre-sale follow-up as part of their prospecting, or what to do when the customer says not yet and before you get that sale. Either way, most sales professionals see follow-up as being not fun. They look at it as laborious and a chore that they have to check the box so they appease their CRM or don’t get in trouble. I want to change the thinking of that. I think follow-up can be fun, follow-up should be fun. When it’s fun for you, it’s certainly more enjoyable for the customer. 

Marylou: Definitely. As you said, there’s a lot of reasons to follow-up, and it’s easier than when you and I got involved in sales and there weren’t these tools out there. It’s—I wouldn’t say effortless—definitely further along so that you can build a follow-up—what we call sequence, or playlist, or whatever you want to call it—to actually reach out to people. You basically have the rocket engine there, but you need to add the value, why are you reaching out, and what are you doing. 

How did you organize the book for us? Is it the kind of book where you could dive into any section, or do you want us to follow along like a story?

Jeff: You could do it either way. The book is laid out to say, let’s talk about your mindset first, then let’s talk about the customers’ mindset, then we’ll give in the skills, techniques, scripts, and everything else. It starts with a discussion about the resistance, that part of us that doesn’t love uncomfortable things. If we see follow-up as something that is a wildly uncomfortable task, our brain is going to come along and say, no, you don’t have to do that. In fact, I’m going to give you some juicy rationalizations about why you should not. 

We’ve got to overcome the mental hurdle first in order to do this. The real important foundational piece of the book is to think about it from the perspective of a customer. If you think about a customer who’s in the process of shopping—it could be for anything at all—when you’re in that shopping process, what’s happening? You’re in the time of what I refer to as high emotional altitude. An emotional altitude measures your degree of positive emotional energy with a product, with a person, or with experience. 

Recently, my wife and I—like many people—we got a quarantine dog. You should think about the process that you’re going through when you’re shopping for a dog. You are emotionally engaged in that process. What happens here is that I’ve engaged now with that product, the website with the salesperson, or whatever it happens to be. Now, what happens? If I’m not ready to pull the trigger, then time has a way of eroding that emotional altitude. 

The purpose of follow-up in the first place is to sustain emotional altitude, to keep that customer emotionally engaged, and feeling very positive. We’re emotional creatures. We make emotional decisions. Sustaining that emotional altitude is going to be just critical. The longer we wait, or the more we abdicate our follow-up—simply an email that’s cranked out by the system—the less likely it will be that we’ll keep that customer in that positive emotional place.

Marylou: There’s a mindset thing here. I know you say in the book, fall in love with follow-up. I used to say fortune in follow-up because as a process person, I’m driven to outcomes. There is an emotional component of loving to do this. Can you give our audience the idea of the conversations that they’re having? We used to always say, mapping calls, it’s 85% fun and 15% not so fun. 

What is a follow-up? When you have the right mindset, is every call a fun call, or is there a nice ratio that people can get excited about?

Jeff: It can be. I think you have to start by answering the question, what is follow-up not? My friend, Art Sobczak, I don’t know if you’ve ever had him on the podcast. 

Marylou: Yes, he’s been on my show twice. 

Jeff: He’s fantastic. When I had him on my podcast, we were talking about what he calls parole officer check-ins. That’s not follow-up, just checking in to see when I’m going to get paid. Just checking in to see if I can meet my quota. That’s not follow-up. 

We have to look at it first and ask, what is follow-up for? To me, I look at it and say, your primary purpose is to serve. If you are serving, that mental script that says, I don’t want to be a nuisance, I don’t want to be guilty of intrusion marketing, and interrupter at dinner. If you’re serving, if you’re truly seeking to serve, A) it will be fun, and B) you’re not being intrusive in any way. 

There is that mindset changed. It has to look and say what am I trying to accomplish here in the first place? I’m so fully behind the idea that this is what salespeople do. They serve and they solve problems. I can assure you one example of what that would look like. If you’ve got a medical problem, and you go and meet with your physician, and you chat a little bit. She’s going to suggest you should probably do this, and then we’ll check back with you here soon. 

The next evening, at 6:30 PM, you get a call from your physician who says, after you left, I was thinking about your situation. I was thinking about your problem. I talked to some colleagues, I did a little research. I think I’ve got a solution here. It’s not going to hurt you. It’s certainly worth trying. Would you like to hear about it?

You want to hear about that. You wouldn’t say to your physician at that point, it’s dinner time, I’m in the middle of dinner, how dare you call me to talk about how to solve my problem while I’m in the middle of dinner. That’s not what you would do. 

The question here is when you’re reaching out to your customer, are you reaching out just to try and figure out how quickly you’re going to get paid, or you’re reaching out to say, you have a significant problem. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got a creative solution here for you. How you approach that is just critical. 

Marylou: Yes. Empathy and those words that you hear a lot about relationships are really important with the follow-up sequence. It’s not necessarily a trusted advisor yet to that level, but it is just letting them know that you care about them and you’re working on trying to figure out ways to help. 

I love the way you say pain or pride because we’re so used to this pain and gain thing. Gain is subjective, but pride—that’s the right word. I made sure I wrote that down when I was listening to your videos. That’s such a good way to think about adding value. They do have challenges, unwanted obstacles, risks, or obstacles that are in their way to get stuff done, but there’s also this pride element, what they hope to gain from that, and how that’s going to reflect either on them personally, socially, functionally, or strategically. I think we lose sight of that sometimes in the follow-up process. 

I was really happy that you delineated it that way. A lot of times, our guys are concerned about the whole, I can’t provide value at every touch. 

Jeff: I just fundamentally disagree with that concept. It takes creativity. You need to know your customer pretty darn well, but I do believe that you could provide value at every touch. I do think that it starts by saying, not just what does their life look like when their problem is solved, or what is the solution to their problem? Again, we’re emotional creatures. How do they want to feel when this problem is solved? That’s where that pride comes into play. 

I think creativity is one of the superpowers for salespeople. If you don’t know your customer very well, then I agree. It’s very difficult to add value every time. But if you know your customer well, if you know the ins and outs of their life, of their business, of who it is that they are, I don’t think it’s as difficult as someone thinks it is to continually add value.

Marylou: I agree. Also, there’s a process—for those of you who were like, Marylou, I can’t figure this out—of delineating row by row (if you will) how you serve. What the beauty of follow-up is that you could articulate how you serve. As we were talking about, there’s pain or there’s a pride component. 

The pain component would be one you may describe that they don’t do something. That means they’re going to be in this pain zone for longer than they really want to be, or they really should be. Because you have a solution now that can get them where they want to go, but you also have something that gets them far beyond where they want to go. That’s your differentiator. 

There’s a lot of ways that you can articulate the conversation in that follow-up touch that says the same pain point but in a variety of different ways. Strategically, financially, and personally how it’s going to affect them, especially in business-to-business. I try to get people to understand that. Let’s pretend you only know through your four pains that your client or prospect is likely to experience through the lens of your products or service.

If you can articulate that pain point in a variety of ways, to hit those emotional triggers like you said. That’s why we lose sight. We try to have unique pains on every touch. A lot of times, that doesn’t happen. In the real world, there could only be one thing that they’re concerned about. If you can articulate it in five different ways, one of those ways is probably going to resonate with them, so that they will want to reach out and get back to you. 

Jeff: In the meantime, you are out carrying everybody else because you are consistently asking yourself the question, how do I solve your problem? Not just how do I stay in your face, but how do I solve your problem? I was just thinking, just this weekend, interestingly, my wife and I are going to switch financial planners or wealth managers (whatever they call themselves these days). We had looked at it and said, we got to make a move on that one. Where do you start? 

It just doesn’t sound like a very fun task. My wife listens to The Dave Ramsey podcast quite a bit. She said, he does this thing where you could enter in your information, and then they’re going to connect you with five financial planners in your area based on who you are and what your needs are. I did that. This was on a Saturday morning. 

I filled it out and immediately, I got a text message. It’s an auto-response, but the text message says, I just sent you an email from this guy named Marshall Goins. I just sent you an email. It’s a 30-second video. We’d love it if you would watch that video. I go over my video, there it is. It’s him saying, it’s the weekend, I’m not working, but we’re going to talk on Monday. I just want to be able to put a face to the name here. Really looking forward to chatting with you. 

That’s on Saturday. On Monday morning, he calls at 8:20. I don’t recognize the phone number so I don’t answer the call, but I get a text message just after, hey, just left you a voicemail, I’m going to be in my office all day long, let’s chat. That’s four points of contact, right? Two text messages, a phone call, and an email, and we’re not 48 hours in. 

For the other four people that I got connected with, I got two-form emails that said, click on this calendar app over here to book a time to talk to one of our financial specialists. I have to tell you, before we could even have a conversion with this guy, he’s already the front-runner. He’s lapped the field. He would have to fall on his face. I would need to figure out this guy is a pedophile to not use him at this point. Why? Because the idea here is that we teach our customers through follow-up how much we care. This is so critical, we teach how much we care. When we don’t follow-up, what we are teaching is that we don’t care, at least not to the level that our customers need us to. 

Marylou: Right. In the book, you talk about the speed of follow-up and how impactful that can be. Again, the technology is here people for us to do this. You heard Jeff say that that first one he knew or felt that it was an auto-response, but again it’s the speed in which the follow-up occurred that makes the person on the other end think, wow, they really do care about me. They do respond to me. If this is something that is started at the beginning, the expectation is, once I become a client, it will be similar levels of service. I love that.

Jeff: Precisely. I think that speed is critical. Sometimes when we think about follow-up, we think, what is this cycle going to look like for the next 90 days? That puts you in a spot where you’re probably going to start wrong because you’re thinking about the laborious nature of follow-up. I don’t think you should be thinking about 90 days, you should be thinking about 90 seconds. 

I think you’re going to be able to look at it and say, how do I stand out from everybody else right away? This is something we talked about earlier—emotional altitude. The more time that lapses between the point of contact with the customer and the time that we get back to them, the more they become unmoored, distanced from that emotional altitude. That speed is critical just to stay connected. Keep that emotional altitude high. 

Marylou: 100%. Besides mindset then, the next step in the book was talking about the strategy of follow-up. Are there any pieces out of that section that you want to make sure we talk about on this call? Just to make sure that people get that in that right zone of what they need to do once the mindset is there? 

Jeff: The number one way that salespeople choose to follow-up is through email. The very least effective way to follow-up is through email. We’ve got to come to grips with this right from the very beginning. I’m not going to say—and I make this very clear in the book—there’s no room for email in a follow-up. That’s not the position that I take. 

The question is, why is email the number one way to follow-up? The reason is because it’s easy. I make this decision based on what is easy for me versus what is impactful for the customer. The fact of the matter is that in the United States today, over 80% of emails get deleted without being read. Even those that do get a cursory glance, sometimes we delete them just by looking at the subject line itself. It is a way for a customer to very quickly dismiss you, and yet we can sort of pat ourselves on the back. Check the box and say, well I did my follow-up. No, you didn’t. 

I want to suggest here that one of the key messages in the book is to let the message choose the medium. There are times wherein in a long conversation with a customer, and I want to be able to send something—a document, a pdf, or whatever it is—great, perfect use of email. But to look at it and say, let’s connect on some personal level, or let’s connect to how I can solve your problem in some way. No, this is best done by telephone or by video chat. 

When we look at it, there’s a communication hierarchy that we have to keep in mind. Face-to-face is always the most impactful, we know that. Second to that, video-to-video. Beyond that, phone-to-phone. Way down the list is that asynchronous communication where I’m sending an email that somebody, in all likelihood, statistically, will never even see in the first place. If we think that that email is going to sustain emotional altitude, we’re kidding ourselves. 

Even the email that I got from the financial advisor was preceded by a text message that said, I just sent you an email. There’s a video on it. I would love for you to watch, only 30 seconds. That was great, it was like, 30 seconds? Yeah, I got 30 seconds. It connected me with that person because I wanted to get that email. It wasn’t a nuisance. I wasn’t going to delete it. I knew it was coming. It was perfectly executed. 

Marylou: Right now, when we’re recording this, we’re in the middle of the health crisis with the United States, which means that sometimes the phone—if your database or your setup isn’t like mine right now—it’s only brick and mortar. It’s not individual lines of direct dial into that person. We do have to be a little bit chameleon as we navigate through how to reach people. 

You mentioned video-to-video as being one of the top besides face-to-face. You say in the book that you don’t have to have the perfect video setup. It’s the authenticity of the message. It’s the empathetic nature of the message. It’s your enthusiasm as you convey the message that’s more important than whether you have the right lighting, microphone, or video camera. That really hit home with me a lot. 

Jeff: Your client already Facetimes with their grandkids. Your client already uses Marco Polo, if they’re a millennial, whatever. We are in the video age. Relative to the pandemic, back in December, Zoom had 10 million subscribers. As of two months ago—when I looked at the article—there were 300 million subscribers. We have learned video. We have figured out video. The whole world is figuring out video, including our customers. 

There is no reason at this point for us to look at it and say, no, I’m just not comfortable because your desire for comfort might very well be the one thing that’s standing in the way of serving your clients the best. We are in the video age. Make no mistake about it. It’s only a question of whether or not you’re going to jump on that train or frankly get left behind.

Marylou: Right. We move on from strategy to actual execution. You did have some great ideas in there. I want everyone to listen to your definition of the lead conversion hour. Again, I teach the power of habit borrowed from a bunch of experts in the field. They teach the five levels of habits, which starts with desire. The very next step is repetition. Then there’s discipline, routine, and then finally habit. It really folded nicely into what you are talking about, the lead conversion hour. Would you share that with us? 

Jeff: Sure. It starts with a premise. When everything is critical, nothing is critical. You can’t have 18 priorities at a given time. It starts by asking the question, what really matters? And what is it that I do that really matters? I’m of the opinion that if you’re a sales practitioner in any walk of life, what really matters is lead conversion. What are we doing here, we’ve got this lead, we’ve got this customer over here, how do I solve their problem and make sure that it is fully and perfectly solved? 

As I look at it from that side, if the lead conversion is that push, then not only do I want to focus on that, but I want to make sure there is a dedicated time early in the day where I can focus on what matters most. For most sales practitioners, you could theoretically hit your office. You start your day at 8:00 AM with no phone messages, no emails, and nothing on your to-do list. Again, this is all theoretical, and by 8:45 AM, you’ll be busy. You’ll be busy all day long. You can, if you are in sales, lead a completely reactive life just trying to juggle all the issues, concerns, and problems that are going to wrap up. 

This is a Stephen Covey, right? The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. What is your main thing? I look at it and say, the main thing is lead conversion. Well, if it is, let’s get that done early for a couple of different reasons. For one thing, you call your customers early. You’re doing your follow-up work early in the day. You’ve given them the entire day to respond versus calling at 4:00, and by the time they call back, you’re gone. 

A second thing is that the longer you wait, the less chance it’s going to get done at all. Oh, I’ll do it later. The next thing you know later turns out to be never. It just doesn’t get done. Another reason to do it early on, you’re fresh. Our bodies are built that way. By the time we get into the afternoon, we’re at the low-point of our circadian rhythm. You’re still fresh and your client is still fresh as well early on in the day. 

You get a good solid hour of your follow-up work, of your lead conversion work done by 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM in the morning, man, you’re ready to take on the world. You are victorious regardless of how the rest of the day goes because you’re in charge of your success. It’s a matter of getting it on the calendar, turning it into a ritual and letting that ritual become a habit over time. At that point what happens? You are in charge. You’re not waiting for the phone to ring without that magic new client. You’re getting that done. It’s a beautiful way to be able to start your day on the right foot.

Marylou: Exactly. What I also recommend for our listeners—especially those who are focused on outbound conversations, outreach—is that you use this follow-up system with vendors and partners who sell companion products into your world with the same client types and start building this network of people. Because then, all of a sudden, the referral channel will start opening up to you to help along with the follow-up of clients and prospects you’re working on right now. 

A lot of times, when we get into this rhythm, this muscle, this endurance of follow-up, we’re able to expand basically the gravitational pull of people now coming to us with new leads and new opportunities to work. Which gets us further up that funnel of awareness, that people already know, love, and trust us (so to speak) because they’ve been referred in. Follow-up is such a big option to use. It’s like the tool on the toolkit that’s the most powerful tool there to get going. 

If you’re in the audience and you’re thinking, okay, this sounds great. Where do I start, Jeff? What do you recommend that they do to get immersed in a little bit more on the whole follow-up process? Where they should start, and how they should go about doing this? What do you recommend for that?

Jeff: Dan Sullivan—the founder of The Strategic Coach program—one of the things that he says here is that all change begins by telling the truth. It really starts by asking yourself the question, how do you feel about follow-up, and why do you feel that way? What is that based on? What’s happening in your life that would cause you to think through, this is something that’s problematic for me. This is something that I don’t like doing. This is something I don’t enjoy. It really begins with that. 

It comes to grips with the idea, what are the stories that you’re telling yourself? If you can turn that outward and say, what is this for my customer? What does this mean to my customer? How do I serve? That’s absolutely the starting point. But then, you got to look at it and say, how do I make it fun? We make it most fun—we make it most personal and more creative. 

If we can look into those opportunities. My system should be in place for what a 90-day follow-up program looks like, but start thinking about it in terms of minutes, not days. That’s when it’s the most enjoyable. Use this time to get creative, to stand out from everybody else because you’re doing things that they’re not doing. Make it fun. If it’s not fun for you, it’s not going to be fun for your customer. 

Marylou: 100%. I remember reading the story of Bill Porter. I’d like to end with you telling his story so that you can get an understanding here in the audience folks that this is something within your reach. This is something that when you hear stories like this, you’ll realize you’re starting off in such a better position, to begin with. That the hill is not going to be as high to climb. If you’ll share that story with us, I would love that.

Jeff: It’s one of the most inspiring stories ever. A gentleman by the name of Bill Porter, in time, became the number one salesperson for a company called Watkins Industries. This was a couple of decades ago. Still, when it was tailing out, but when door-to-door sales were the thing. He sold household products, cleaning products, all kinds of different things out of a catalog door-to-door. 

His territory was in the hilly area of Portland, Oregon. In fact, he had to beg to get that job. He just said, give me your worst route, the route that nobody else will take. He got it. He would walk seven miles a day in rainy Portland uphills. One last thing, Bill Porter suffered from cerebral palsy. He had a hard time walking. He had a hard time speaking, communicating. What happened over time? 

He had more doors slammed in his face than he could ever count. He almost got hit by a car, still finished his route by the way. But his tenacity is amazing. There was a movie made about this. William H. Macy did a phenomenal job. It’s called Door to Door. Very, very highly recommended even if you’re not in sales. It is an incredibly powerful story about the human spirit. 

When you look at that, there is this idea where Bill Porter didn’t end up being a salesperson. He ended up being a part of people’s lives. When Bill Porter retired, his customers were devastated. A part of their life was lost at that point because he had so stepped into saying, how can I serve you? I just love that. 

Those people who would look at it and say, follow-up is all about wrangling that next dollar. Here’s a client behind that door. They got a dollar, and it’s got my name on it. I just reject all of this idea. The question is, how do I serve? If I can get a serve first mentality, then I can make follow-up fun both for me and for my customer.

Marylou: To finish that story, you’ve mentioned about the knee of the curve, which was definitely the Bill Porter story, and I know that it’s our story as well. Elaborate on that. What do you mean by that?

Jeff: The knee of the curve. The idea that oftentimes, we put in efforts over a long period of time, and we don’t really see the dramatic results. We see just slow incremental growth, and then we hit what economists called the knee of the curve. It’s when all of that effort now starts to pay off. When it started out as a line, it was almost horizontal, just trickling up a little bit and our response suddenly shoots up. There’s that bend, that knee of that curve, and it shoots up. 

We tend to look at it and go, oh no, I didn’t get anywhere with that last call. If that was Bill Porter’s mindset, then you can forget it. He would’ve quit a long time ago. It’s that staying, that sticktoitiveness, that suddenly you’re going to look at. You’re going to say, I am miles ahead of my competition. I had paid the price. They didn’t see it. They didn’t get to see all the hard work that went into it. 

Now, they’re shaking their heads saying, what is that guy doing? That’s not the question. The question should be, what has that person been doing for the longest time as a habit of follow-up to be able to get where he or she is today?

Marylou: That consistency of effort. In the book, you’ve mentioned the Beatles, who we all think of as an overnight success story.

Jeff: Yeah, they splashed on the United States like who are these guys? Where did they come from out of nowhere? It wasn’t out of nowhere. It was literally playing gigs eight hours in a row in a club in Germany with nobody in the audience, but the owner telling them, listen, when you stop playing, then for sure nobody’s going to come in. And so, they played and they played and they played. You didn’t see the hard work that went into it. All you saw was the end result. To put it in another way, it takes a long time to become an overnight sensation.

Marylou: There you go. The book is called Follow-up and Close the Sale: Make Easy (and Effective) Follow‑Up Your Winning Habit. 

Jeff, thank you so much for your time today. Very much appreciated. I’ll be sure to put all your links on how to get a hold of you. Jeff also has—which my team has listened to—nine videos that a company has booked, that will give you a good jump start on where to get started, how to get started. He talks in detail about the different ways we can communicate. I think there’s all video on video, as a matter of fact. 

Jeff: There is.

Marylou: Those are great getting started things. I’ll make sure that we put all your connection information if people want to talk to you directly. Thanks so much for your time. Very much appreciated.

Jeff: It was a lot of fun. Thank you.