Over the years, it’s become more and more obvious that the subscription model is a viable business model for any number of products and services. How can you develop a membership mindset? What can successful subscription models teach you about sales? Today’s guest is the expert on the subject. Listen in to hear from Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of The Membership Economy and the new book The Forever Transaction. In today’s episode, Robbie discusses her background and qualification, what she knows about cultivating good customers, and what listeners can do to get started on a membership mindset. 

Episode Highlights:

• How Robbie came to be an expert in her subject
• Parallels to the SAAS world in Robbie’s process
• B to C companies vs B to B companies
• How Robbie decided to write her book
• Where to get started with a membership mindset
• Indicators of good customers
• Putting customers on a path to success
• Whether surveys important at looking at where clients are
• Top three things listeners can do to get started
• The difference between customer support and customer success

Resources:

Robbie Kellman Baxter

The Forever Transaction

Transcript:

Marylou: This book of yours is so interesting. It’s interesting for a number of reasons. Before we get into introducing you and all the good stuff, you said you’re a subject matter expert. How did this all come about for you? This is really interesting.

Robbie: Up until that 20 years ago, I was a strategy consultant, and then I was a product marketing person. I got laid off when I was on maternity leave with my second child. I said, okay, I’m a good consultant. I liked being a consultant better than a product person. I was like, okay, I’m going to go back to consulting, at least until my kids are out of diapers and make a living that is with control over my career. 

As I was doing that, I thought, actually I want to keep doing this. I don’t think I want to go back to being a product manager or as a product director at that time. If you want to be an independent consultant, you have to either grow into a real firm or you have to become a subject matter expert. Otherwise, in my opinion, you’re just arms and legs. You’re just a trainer. You’re just a fill-in for somebody on leave, but you’re not really a consultant. Once I realized that I was like, okay well, I need an expertise. I need an area of expertise. 

My fifth client as an independent consultant was Netflix. In the back of my head, I’m thinking, I need something that is big enough and juicy enough that I can focus on it for—in my mind, at the time—at least five years. It also needs to be known enough that it’s memorable and plausible that I can be an expert. 

If I said I’m an expert on strategy, you would say, yeah, you and everybody else. If I said I’m an expert on marketing, hard to believe. If I said I’m an expert on marketing financial services digitally, maybe that’s more credible, but that’s not that interesting. At least not for me. 

I’m working with Netflix. I’m starting to get calls from people that said, oh, we heard you worked at Netflix. We want to be the Netflix of our business—news, music, software, video games, whatever. At the same time, I started doubling down on it. I was writing about it. 

Eventually, I stopped taking work where I felt like the company didn’t have a membership mindset. I was doing a lot of work with SaaS companies. I was doing a lot of work with consumer software, professional services. If you came in and said something like, we have these hardware servers, and we need somebody to create some marketing copy or a product roadmap, I’d just say no to that work. 

Then, 10 years later, I finally wrote The Membership Economy and really claimed my space, but I’d been working in that space for 20 years of just doing subscription stuff. 

Marylou: Okay. The terminology you use in your world, there are some parallels to the SaaS world. That’s why I was like, I don’t think she’s in the SaaS world.

Robbie: I was. I grew up there. 

Marylou: Yeah, you’re in Palo Alto, you’re definitely in that area. It’s all SaaS. What was interesting though is how there are some parallels in this whole process that you could easily go back and forth, ebb and flow.

Robbie: I do. All the time. My experience has been that in most SaaS companies, marketing is not the key area for them. They tend to invest more heavily in engineering and sales. It’s really valuable when they take a step back and say, how can we use our marketing lever to support our excellent sales and our excellent technology? Consumer businesses start with marketing. 

Marylou: Yeah, they do. I had the opportunity a while back to work with the Gartner Group. They were an IT firm, now they do marketing. We were interviewing this part of a project. We listened to some interviews with B2B marketing people and B2C marketing people. Target was one of them. I’ll never forget the Target guy. 

It was just B2B people reminding me of our government. They’ve been there forever. Stuff doesn’t change—sort of like McGraw-Hill. The B2C people were on top of the latest everything. It was amazing that they obviously all had the same education in college or whatever to become a marketing person. They’re some kind of MBA or something that they got. But then when they branched off in two different areas, wow. I would love to learn from a B2C marketer than a B2B marketer any day. 

Robbie: Totally. There’s this book that I love called Power by Jeff Pfeffer. One of the pieces of advice that he gives to young people is whatever discipline you want to be in, go to a company where that’s where the power is. 

If you want to be in marketing, don’t go to a B2B company, don’t go to a SaaS company. If you want to be in sales, SaaS is a pretty great place to be. It’s much more strategic. It’s much more important. The best salespeople gravitate there because there’s more money, more interesting work, and more challenge. For me, as a marketer—I love marketing and strategy, so I have ended up more on the consumer side. Also, consumer stories are more easily grabbable than SaaS case studies. 

Marylou: Well, they’re real-world and people can relate because we are all consumers at the end of the day. 

Robbie: Yeah. Exactly.

Marylou: What really struck me—the word forever is a big word in SaaS. It’s a word that implies lifetime value and reducing churn. We need to get better at the forever part in maintaining our client base so that we can get the multiples we’re trying to get when we’re moving to IPO, getting bought out, or whatever. When COVID started, everything on this crazy train was trying to figure out how companies evaluated. The evaluation of companies is just interesting.

Marylou: Hey, everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest—you guys are going to love this show because when I first was introduced to Robbie’s work, I had my SaaS hat on. Some of the terminology that she was mentioning was very appealing to me because it was all about (I thought) customer attention, loyalty, making sure that we would use our churn. But it turns out there’s even more stuff that she has to tell us about. 

I’ll let her get into that, but the word subscription was the word that was coming bouncing back and forth. She’s a subject matter expert in all things subscription. She has her own firm called Peninsula Strategies out in California. Right now, as we are having this podcast, California’s under fire, literally.

Robbie: California is on fire.

Marylou: On fire, under fire, hopefully, you’re breathing okay. She’s also the author of this amazing book called The Forever Transaction. We’re going to talk about that, and we’re also going to talk about her experiences. I’m going to ask her—and I know she does this already. I’m sure she bounces back and forth between subscriptions, which like in Netflix, think of membership when you think of subscription. And then a subscription for us, which is how we keep these people happy, retain them as clients, and get the penetration and usage and loyalty that we’re looking for. Without further ado, welcome to the podcast. 

Robbie: Thanks so much for having me, Marylou.

Marylou: Wonderful. Tell me, how did the book come about? Oh, she’s also published by McGraw-Hill, which is one of my favorite publishers since my book is already there. She’s had the McGraw-Hill experience, so we are kindred in that as well. Tell me about the book and how you decided to do this at this point in your career. 

Robbie: I wrote another book—The Membership Economy—five years ago. I wrote that book because I felt like after many, many years in Silicon Valley working with SaaS companies—working with consumer subscription companies, working with professional services firms, and associations—that there was tremendous power in this long-term focus and reorienting and organization around a long-term value proposition, instead of a short-term or episodic one. 

I had come to believe that any business could do this—B2B, B2C, digital, print, old-fashioned physical product, you name it. I was having trouble conveying this idea to a lot of executives. They would say, it doesn’t work for me. I don’t understand. We tried subscription once and it didn’t work, therefore it would never work. I wrote my first book to say, hey, membership economy is a real thing. It’s happening now. It could help you—better predictive revenue, a better understanding of who your customers are, and how they use your products. And of course, that wonderful better multiple when you go to sell in the public markets. 

Five years later, I don’t have to explain to anybody anymore that subscriptions are powerful. What I’m finding is people are struggling with the execution of the model. I wrote this book as a how. If the first book was a why and a what, this is how to do it, how to launch a subscription business, how to scale it, and then how to maintain your relationships and your leadership status over time without growing long in the tooth and not relevant for tomorrow’s members.

Marylou: Okay. I’m sitting here thinking, we all know that we put big offices on sales. And marketing for us is a little bit of an afterthought. We love marketing from the standpoint of top-of-funnel, inbound leads, but as soon as it becomes close to one, we lose track of it from that point. You’re here to help us understand that we don’t want to lose sight of it because of these things, these multiples that you’re talking about. The ability to get your company either bought out, go public, or even if you just want to grow and stay healthy within the family (so to speak).

The understanding of lifetime value for us is a term we all know, but you’re right, we don’t necessarily know how to execute or execute well. You’re here to tell us that we can learn from the B2C environment—business-to-consumer environment—or environments like that where there’s a place to non-membership that’s highly coveted and maintaining those memberships. Versus us who were used to that new wheel. 

Robbie: New logos. All about the logo chart. That slide with all the new logos and you’re bored saying, hey, show me the new logos. What do you have? What’s new and sexy? I want to say, let’s make retention sexy. That’s the t-shirt I want to wear. 

Marylou: I am loving this talk. I could think of two clients off the top of my head. One of them is 95-5—95% base, 5% net new. It’s a big company, gigantic. They’re lucky right now that they have the 95% who are pretty consistent. They want to get better at that. A great way to start. How does this all work?

Robbie: For any business that wants to enjoy all these benefits of a membership mindset, you want to start by saying, what’s the long-term value that I’m creating for my customer? And then build everything around the long term value instead of the short term episode. That has a bunch of implications for salespeople. 

The first one is that you only want to sell to somebody who’s going to stay for a long time because you might even lose money if you acquire a customer and lose them too quickly. The cost of acquisition—your time, the time to onboard them, the time the customer’s success team is spending—that’s all wasted if you don’t deepen and expand the relationship over time. That’s a starting point that your marketing funnel becomes a little bit narrower. 

The qualification process becomes more important. It’s like if I’m just dating to have a good time—I don’t really care if the person’s attractive, interesting, funny, or anything. Maybe I’ll go out with them once or twice. But if I’m thinking about marriage and I’m thinking about having to spend the rest of my life with this person, I’m going to be a lot more particular about who I want to date. 

This is the core idea of a member mindset is if you want to enjoy that predictable, recurring revenue—that huge lifetime value—it starts at the very beginning. It starts with how you market. It starts with how you choose who to have a transaction with at all. And then it continues after that point of sale—like you said we’re all about to close. How does your customer success team onboard that new subscriber to maximize the likelihood of them making your products and services part of their new normal, part of their habits? 

It becomes really important, for example, that the sales team and the customer success team are working really closely just like the marketing and sales team on the other side so that you’re all working together to have this long-term relationship. 

Marylou: There are so many areas of opportunity in that last statement you made about sales working with customer service because it’s not a common bond between the two areas as well.

Robbie: I have a funny story for you. I was working with a SaaS company, and we were working with their new customer success organization. Customer success as opposed to customer support where the emphasis is more on making your customers really happy, deepening, and strengthening the relationship, as opposed to just waiting for them to call with the problem. We’re looking at this new customer success organization, and we’re trying to figure out how to optimize customer success for engagement retention and expansion. 

We did this exercise where we said, okay, let’s look at all of our customers that we have—these were all going to be B2B customers—and let’s make two groups. I asked the sales team. The ones that are valuable that have really been great and you want more of, and the ones that have flamed out, not been valuable, or have been more trouble than they’re worth. We made the two lists, and I asked the customer success person to tell me what she noticed about the two groups. 

She looked at the list of the good ones and she said, oh, those are my difficult clients. Those are the ones who are the pain in the neck. She said, those are the ones that on day one are like, I thought we were going to have this feature? How come we don’t have this feature? I’m trying to bring in my finance team and they don’t understand how they’re supposed to use it. I need you to talk to them. You said it worked this way, but I see it working that way, and I need you to fix that. They’re really difficult and demanding. 

What we realized was that the ones who were the most difficult and demanding were the ones who were trying to make this a habit. They were the ones who were to take this new product that they bought and actually use it really hard and get a lot of value out of it. They were taking it really seriously. They were the best customers. The ones that had a really, really easy onboarding process where they’re like, we got it. We’re on it. Thank you. We don’t need any more help—those guys were the ones that canceled, never demanded, or flamed out. 

It’s funny, but when you look at it that way, your customer success colleagues, they’re going to find the most valuable customers may be the most difficult. It’s important to keep that in mind. 

Marylou: That is important. I wouldn’t have thought of it that way. My brain is always looking at usage and penetration within the account. My brain says if we have a lot of usage of whatever it is—your service or product—and you found pockets within the new logo that you can deploy this thing—you have a lot of people, a lot of seats, a lot of however you’re selling your units of the software service, you have a large number of those. 

Those by definition would be loyal, but I didn’t overlay the fact that they’re also engaging because they want to learn more. They want to know more. They’re challenging where they are right now along their success path, and they want to grow to become super successful, which as you’ve pointed out, then starts to become new normal for them. 

Robbie: Yeah. Exactly. That engagement is a leading indicator of what you’re talking about. In order for the seats to be used and the expansion to happen, the employees, the users have to be engaged. Often, a good signal that someone is engaging is that they’re having questions, problems, and challenges because they’re diving in. They’re exploring. A lot of times, software companies find that we have 152 different features, and our customers are only using one feature.

Marylou: Yeah, one or two.

Robbie: One of the key metrics that are really important in onboarding is usually a company wants to see if they use two, three, or five features in the first X period, that’s a really good indicator that they’re going to be a good customer. One piece of advice for people listening is to try to backward analyze and think back into what are those features that when you see a new customer using these features you say, oh, that’s going to be a good expanding account for me. 

And then you could go to your customer success team and say, look, when you have a new customer, really focus on these three features because that’s going to lead to them really getting the value out of this. Which is going to lead to them coming back to me and wanting to subscribe to the next level up, access more features, and so on. 

Marylou: This is a big thing for me coming because I’m trained as an engineer by trade. I’m a computer programmer. One of the biggest things that I think is important is to be able to suggest a path to success. We start here, then we master this, then we had this thing on, and then put a little salt on it. Once we get that going, we get this thing. It gives them a progression path. It’s like training for Ironman or something. First, you’re running a mile, then all of a sudden you’re at five. It’s just like that. 

I think we’re missing that. We’re like, be free. We send people on their way. We don’t have the right metrics either. I heard the cost of acquisition metric. We do have that. What happens for usage and penetration and where they are on the glide path to success metric—I wouldn’t even know what those are called. I couldn’t even tell you how we’re tracking those. I have no idea of lifetime value. That’s what’s amazing in your world is you’re starting with that. You’re starting with the end in mind that they are loyal clients for life, and you’re working backward for that. That’s interesting. 

Robbie: You’re bringing up such a great point about this path to success or you called it the glide path to success. I love that. 

Marylou: I’m sitting with my husband, by the way. He’s a retirement person. He’s gliding towards retirement. 

Robbie: I’d like to be running toward retirement. Like any business, you should be thinking about once you bring somebody in, you want to put them on that glide path to success. You know from your past customers what the best customers do. 

Marylou: The behavior and the timeline. There are some concrete chunks that you can put together. You may not be 100% right, but at least you got a baseline.

Robbie: Exactly. Your customer success team or your onboarding team can say, our best customers often do this when they get started. They bring in these people and usually they do this exercise and we can facilitate that. Or you actually build that into the product itself so that it’s self-service. You get guided to the right features. 

For example, you talked about how I’ve worked with a lot of consumer companies. Companies like Netflix, HBO, or any of the streaming content companies, one of the things they want you to do—they know you’re probably coming in for one piece of content. You came to Disney+ because you want to watch Hamilton. You have no intention of the princesses. You’re like, I’m going to sign up. I’m going to watch Hamilton, and I’m going to get out of there. 

The job of Disney in onboarding you—which of course they do through the product itself, not through customer success people—is to help you discover other content that you’re going to enjoy before you cancel. They’re trying to help you reach other features before your month is over. It might be the princesses, but it might be, oh, I didn’t even know that National Geographic titles were available for Disney, or I didn’t even know that you have these adventure titles. That’s one way of expanding the relationship. 

Another one is they know from past experience that people who are enjoying their content on a tiny little phone are more likely to cancel than people who are enjoying the content on their great, big Smart TV. It becomes really important to build that into the product. To say welcome to Disney+. Here are the steps you can use so that you can enjoy our content on your big screen. They walk you through that because they know that if they help you get the best experience that their best customers enjoy, you’re much more likely to make this a habit, and you’re likely to stay for a long time and be really profitable. The same principles apply to onboard a new SaaS client. 

Marylou: Right. The word friction. If you make it easy so that we don’t have to think, then it’s natural to be like, oh my gosh, I didn’t know that. All of us now—I can’t speak for all the audience, but since I’m not traveling, I am a Netflix junkie now. I like crime shows. I’m constantly looking for crime shows and things that I can watch in the wee hours of the night. I’m usually at a hotel or doing something else, and now I’m home. The house can only get so clean. There’s so much stuff I can do, so many hostas I can plant. It’s been really interesting. 

I have been watching how they keep me engaged. The word frictionless really comes up. I can use that app, and I’m one of those crazy people who actually use my phone. My kids just chide me on that because they’re like, how could you watch a movie on the phone? I am that kind of person. I don’t care how big the screen is, but I do care about what’s next after I finish this? All of a sudden, there is this, what’s the next thing, or if you like that, then you’ll love this. 

It’s like the Amazon thing. If you like this, then you may like this. Or people who bought this also like that. We can do similar things with our product. If you like the feature, this is the next step. We give you this kind of output, or you could use it for this type of scenario if you’re working in this area. We don’t do that. We’re really bad at that. 

Robbie: Even in the prospecting phase, you can start to bring some of these elements into your conversation to say, our best customers don’t usually sign up for one feature. They usually sign up for two or three. These are the three features for companies like you. Usually what happens is… You could tell them their own story. I always think about, for salespeople, really understanding the customer journey. It’s not the customer journey with your product. It’s the customer journey that drove them to buy your product. 

For example, let’s say you provide financial advice. You help people with their taxes and managing their budgets and with their investments and things. You could say, these are the points where they engage with me, but you could start by saying what would make somebody want to invest time and resources into their finances? Maybe they graduated from college, and their parents told them it’s time to be an adult. That happens. We’re both parents of young adults. Maybe it’s because they want to buy a house. Maybe it’s because they just got their first real jobs, they have real money, and they’re like, oh, man, I got to be careful. 

We know, as the company, anybody who just graduated from college—probably, they’re going to want to get a credit card. They want to get to start thinking about their credit. They’re going to, maybe in a few years, want to buy a home. They’re going to maybe get married and combine resources. They’re maybe going to have a child and want to plan for that. They’re going to want to think about retirement. 

Those are all the steps in being a responsible adult. You can explain that to your customer. Here, I see the path that you’re on, and our product helps you at every stage. You lead with their journey. You lead with this understanding that this is what I know you’re going to go through. I know what the problems are that you’re going to face, and our product moves along with you and your journey and solves those problems as they arise.

Marylou: Plus, while you’re telling those stories of current clients or people who have put their faith and trust in you, you’re delivering social proof. The decision process and that trust and rapport, it starts to build internally. That oh my gosh, they’ve worked with such and such, this type of university or whatever it is. They have proof points that resonate with me. They know me, so they know where I’m going to be going through. 

Introducing that up at the top-of-funnel where you mentioned prospecting is the best place to start talking about this because we’re trying to get people emotionally engaged. That’s the duty dating part. We’re trying to get them to go on a date with us. We’re trying to get them to a point where they already know, love, and trust us even though they just met us. That is where we can bring in those stories. They’re so important. 

Let me ask you this. Are surveys a part or important in learning more about where your clients are or are we looking at data to help us make these decisions to see how they’re using the product or service? What would you say?

Robbie: That’s such a good question, first of all. A lot of people will say to me, oh, Steve Jobs. People don’t even know what they want. Steve Jobs never asked people what they wanted. He just knew. I think that is oversimplifying the magic of Apple. What I think you need to tease apart and what Apple is really good at is the difference between what people say they want. 

People are really good at telling you what their problems are. They’re experts on that. They’re good at telling you what’s hard. They’re good at telling you what’s frustrating. They’re good at telling you how they spend their time and their money. What they’re not good at telling you is how they should solve those problems.

Marylou: Right. 

Robbie: When you’re doing market research, you don’t want to ask them how they would solve the problem, but you can ask them what the problem is. And then, in terms of understanding how they use a product—we always joke in our family—people lie. They’re not going to tell you the truth. They’re going to say they’re going to use this feature or that feature, that they need it, or that it’ll be really important to them, but they’re not trustworthy. If you have behavioral data, if you can actually see how they use the product, that’s going to be much more valuable than what they tell you they’re going to do. Oh, if I have a Peloton, I’m going to ride it five days a week. And then you’re like, oh no, it turns out it’s more like twice a week. 

Marylou: […] with that.

Robbie: Exactly. There’s so much aspiration, hopefulness. Also, when you do market research, people want to be nice to you. People are going to usually be much more positive in their answers. One thing that I’ve done with market research is if you tell them, if I had this product, tell me about your problems. Okay. Is this one of your problems? The thing that my product solves. Yes. Okay, if that’s one of your problems, do you think that this would solve it? Yes. Great. If I offered you a 10% discount right now, would you buy it? And then they’re like, well, no. I got to talk to my colleagues. 

But if they’re pulling up their checkbook and saying, I want first dibs, then you know you’re on to something because they’re ready to put their money where their mouth is. Whereas a lot of times people will say, oh that’s really interesting. What a great product. And then they say, no, it’s not really for me. Whenever a prospect says, I’m sure there are other people out there that would love this, but I don’t really need it for these reasons. You know that you have not found a product-market then.

Marylou: Right. And really what we’re looking for the quality of product-market fit, and let all the other ones find their own path. That’s another very difficult thing for us as SaaS companies because, like you said, the board is always looking for net new and what have you done for me lately? 

This whole nurturing of the base—we hear it’s more expensive to get a new client than to maintain a current client. We hear that, we know that, but we don’t necessarily have a systematic approach or methodology that we feel would be more predictable for us so that we could take the time and put it in. It is always seemingly the afterthought. Now, as we are maturing—all of us in the SaaS world—it’s becoming more important. When I saw your book, I was like, oh. It’s the how, even. How to do it?

Robbie: Yeah. I think the good news is that a lot of investors, a lot of board directors are becoming more sophisticated about understanding the power of subscription. They’re interested in ARR—Annual Recurring Revenue, and Monthly Recurring Revenue metrics. They’re understanding churn more. 

Marylou: It’s the key.

Robbie: It’s really the responsibility of the company to educate its board on what the leading metrics are and what is important. To say, look, we have some logos, but we’re not going to show them to you because that’s not where you should be focusing. We’re going to talk to you about retention, engagement, and expansion. Our increasing understanding of the journey that our customers go on, and our ability to predict—I know predict is your word—when a new prospect becomes a customer. We have confidence in predicting what their lifetime value is going to be, and that’s what you should be excited about. Not that we have a new customer, but that we know the value of that customer on day one. 

Marylou: Once we get them and we culture our lists and our outreach based on this ideal profile of this correct customer for us, we’re not just throwing crap at the top-of-funnel. Anything warm will work. We’re actually doing a total addressable market study, but out of that, where do we fit? Where is the total serviceable market? The serviceable market that we know we can retain these clients in our very high lifetime value rate. 

That’s the biggest conversation I have with people right now is the difference between the total addressable market. Yes, great, but what’s the serviceable market? I’m now going to steal some of your stuff because I could never really describe what that meant. It is a lifetime value, but if we could put some beef behind it as to why it’s important, maybe I’ll get people to actually buy into that. I can tell you that I see the eyes go blank when I start talking TSM, Total Serviceable Market. People are looking at me like, what are you talking about?

Robbie: Yeah. It’s very sophisticated. One way to think about it—I always talk about the most basic things—your best customers and your not-best customers. Your not-best customers are the ones that leave too soon before you start making money off of them. Your not-best customers are the ones that are very expensive to service. To start thinking about that and say, look at this. All the best ones are the ones that have stayed a long time. 

Let’s talk about how we get them to stay a long time and why they’re more valuable. Look, in month one, we’re still losing money on them because of everything we spent on our sales team, our onboarding, and acquisition. It’s only on month four that we’re actually making a profit.

Marylou: Right. Let’s actually drill down on that. A lot of us have a handful of clients with whom we could do this type of analysis. If our recordkeeping is decent, we should have some of these data points in our databases. Our CRMs—our customer relationship management systems—and we can start tracking that. 

We have the ability to do so. It’s understanding what a good recipe would be is where we’re still—yeah, I’m not quite sure how this all fits together. I would say “new” because I’ve been doing sales for 35 years now. What’s new is really old, but there is this new concept called the pod a few years old coming out of Silicon Valley actually. Where we’re combining the account manager role inside of the pod with salespeople. 

They’re all sitting now together and they are looking at (holistically) the client. How do we expand them? How do we serve them? What are their usage and penetration? Are there referral sources inside of this client that we can leverage for referrals instead of having to go with outbounding and outreaching every time prospecting that we get referred in? Because getting a warm referral is going to shorten the timeline to get to close. 

Those are the kind of things that are starting to come up now for those companies that have matured in their SaaS world. This is the perfect topic for them now to dive into this part of the funnel, which, frankly, a lot of companies have ignored because there’s this mentality that there’s a big world out there of net new that we can go after. I love the idea of what you put together. 

People are listening here, they’re buying into all this. Where do we start? What are the top three things homework for us to go do to start to compile? Is this right for me to dive into this? Besides reading a book—which everybody, grab a book and do that—what are the things that you see all the time, that you’re like, okay, just do these three things to get started. Give it a go, these three things. Do you have that or what are they?

Robbie: Yeah. For salespeople, if that’s your lever, number one is to focus on who’s your best customer for lifetime value. 

Marylou: The A, B—Best customer, not-best customer, start there.

Robbie: Start there. You’ll find you’re saving a lot of time because you’re not wasting your time talking to the not-best customers. If somebody comes in, you know you’re going to stay. You know you’re going to continue to get revenue from them. You know it’s going to expand. 

Number two, make the people on either side of the customer relationship chain your two best friends. On the one side, marketing, so that they give you the kind of leads that are going to lead to expanding relationships. On the customer success or customer support side, make sure that they know how to onboard new customers to maximize lifetime value.

Marylou: When you say that, the personality type of the customer service people that I have the privilege of working with are very reactive people.

Robbie: I hear you. Yes. This is the difference between customer support—and again, it depends on you know who’s listening and how much leverage they have within their organization. A lot of times, salespeople have a lot of clout.

Marylou: This is the perfect world, the perfect bubble. The COVID is […]

Robbie: Yeah. In the perfect world, you say, I don’t want customer support people. I want customer success people who work as partners with me. The difference between customer support and customer success, as you just said, is customer support is reactive—fix the thing that’s broken, great for the squeaky wheel. 

Customer success is proactive—reach out to the new customer and make sure that they are on that nice glide path to getting tremendous value. I always say a customer success person is about making sure that the customers are getting the value they’re paying for. Because if they’re getting the value they’re paying for, they’re going to be happy, they’re going to want to expand, they’re going to want to be referable, and they’re going to want to do more with you if they’re getting value. The most important thing that happens after they sign the contract is how quickly you can get them to value.

If you have to talk to your customer success lead, your customer support lead, or if you have to go to your CEO and say, we need customer success, not customer support. Or if you have to just go find the best customer support person on the team and say—I don’t want the CEO to hear this, but I know that if I was a salesperson and I had a customer support team supporting me instead of a customer success one, I would be looking for who is the person on the customer support team who is the most proactive, the most sales-oriented, the most results-oriented, and I would give my clients that person’s phone number.

Marylou: Okay. Great advice. Definitely, the reactive versus the pro-active. If I were to interview all my clients right now, I don’t think there’s a pro-active one in the bunch that’s under the support or professional services side of life, no.

Robbie: It sounds like you have clients where you have the power to change that. The first thing that you do is you change their metrics. Most customer support people, their metrics are like shortening the call, getting them off the phone, or tearing up the ticket. What you want it to be is, of course, a net promoter score or some kind of loyalty metric. Maybe, you also want to look at the retention rate. 

Each customer support person has a certain set of accounts they’re supporting. What’s the retention rate and how do they compare with one another? And then, expansion. Are these customers buying more? Are they more seats, more services, new products? Put that into the customer support dashboard. That’ll change the way they behave and that’ll change who gets rewarded and recognized. 

Marylou. That’s great advice. That was two. We have one more from you. You kind of gave us the whole profile of proactive versus reactive. I appreciate that.

Robbie: The last thing I would do is—salespeople are on the frontlines. They’re seeing the customer. They’re hearing the language the customer is using. They’re very aware of what the headline benefit is that’s going to get someone to close. They’re also really good. They also often hear, hey, you promised me this and it didn’t work. 

I know salespeople don’t always like to do this because their time is so precious, but taking the time to give that feedback to your marketing friends and to your product friends. Just say, look, this is the problem they’re coming for. They don’t use 99% of the features. We can expand that, but let’s focus on getting right that journey in order of the features. 

Giving that feedback back to your colleagues is only going to make it easier for you to close the next deal and for that next deal to expand and grow in a way that makes it easier for you to exceed your number and frankly delight your customers, which is the most motivating of things is to have your customer say, you change my life. You made my job so much easier. You help me achieve my goals and get my bonus. All of that as well.

Marylou: Right. I have more time with my family, or whatever the result of protecting your security or advancement that they’re looking for. You were able to deliver that, and that’s just a great feeling all the way around. It’s a good feeling when you know you can do that. 

Well, this has been a lovely discussion, and I very much appreciate your time. We know to go get the book—The Forever Transaction. We know your website. Go ahead and give us your website.

Robbie: Yeah, it’s my name, robbiekellmanbaxter.com. I have lots of resources there, videos, content, and lots of help with all the different parts of how you build this kind of predictable engine for growth and profitability. It’s right-aligned with Marylou’s work. Like peas in a pod.

Marylou: It’s totally. I’m top-of-funnel then. Someone does get in too close—various people—and then you take it from there. The feedback loop is the third advice you gave to us. It’s probably one of the most important things that shame on us, with the technology and everything that we have, it takes 30 seconds to a minute to wrap up the conversation saying it was this product or this feature, this was the issue. And then, trace that back into marketing or to customer success. We’re guilty of not doing that. 

I think that’s a big lesson for us. A little bit of recordkeeping goes a long way in order to further the conversation later, shorten the lag in the pipeline, raise the conversion rates of getting to close. It feels good all way around if we’re good and diligent about doing these. 

Thank you so much for your time. I very much appreciate it. We’ll make sure all of your notes and all of the links are on your page. We very much appreciate you taking the time and sharing this information with us.

Robbie: Such a pleasure to talk to you, Marylou. Thank you so much for having me.

Marylou: Thank you.

Sales is more than numbers, quotas, and commissions, but it can be easy to lose sight of the value that you can bring to others through sales. Today’s guest is here to talk about going beyond the numbers and embracing service through sales. 

Clancy Clark is the author of a book called Selling by Serving: Find Fulfillment in Your Career and Sell More Than You Ever Thought Possible. He’s also the author behind a method that he uses for selling and speaking and coaching that teaches about how to have a more fulfilling sales career. Listen in to hear what Clancy has to say about the steps of his method, the role of empathy in sales, and how listeners can learn how to apply Clancy’s methods. 

Episode Highlights:

• How intuition and being human are the precursors for Clancy’s book
• How Clancy was able to create a series of steps for selling by serving
• Whether the steps should be followed in a particular order
• How empathy on the part of salespeople will factor into sales post-Covid-19
• Looking at sales as a way of helping people
• Sincerity in sales
• The ways that listeners can learn about how to apply Clancy’s steps in their practice
• Method vs. Mastery

Resources:

Clancy Clark

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi, everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Clancy Clark. Clancy Clark has written a book called Selling by Serving: Find Fulfillment in Your Career and Sell More Than You Ever Thought Possible. He’s also the author behind a method that he uses for speaking, coaching, and working with you. It’s the path to a fulfilling career in sales. 

He’s got the book, and then with the book, he facilitates this to start teaching us how to have a more fulfilling sales career that’s beyond the numbers. You know from the work that I do that we’re always looking at the numbers, we’re looking at the method. What Clancy is saying the method is there, but it’s more than that.

So I wanted him to come on the show today because the book is something that I think you all should get, look at, and take to heart, that selling is really being of service. It’s adding more value. We get so caught up in the end result of the numbers of the commissions, of the goals, of the actuals that sometimes we forget that there’s somebody on the other side of the table from us who was trying to serve. Clancy, welcome to the podcast. I’m so happy that you’re here today.

Clancy: Thank you so much for having me, Marylou. It’s really a pleasure.

Marylou: Really for us, this is almost like opening a window because we are very focused. You say in your book, there are millions of books out there on how to sell, but what you’re trying to do is instill in us that there’s more to selling than selling a widget. It’s about the people. It’s about adding value, of being of service, and I really love the way that you approach this because there is a little bit of method here. But intuition and being human are really the precursor for diving into your book. Would you agree with that? 

Clancy: Absolutely. I’ve been in sales for more than 30 years, and when I was in my late 20s, I took a career aptitude test because I could see that being a sheepherder probably wasn’t my long-term viable career path. I came back high in sales, and I was so upset to hear that because I didn’t want to be one of those sleazy, pushy, half-honest salespeople. Yet, just a short time later, I had my first job in sales, traveling all of Western Montana, calling on cattle ranchers, and I decided that I would make it honorable because I would make it so by bringing the values that I’ve lived by in my personal life to the work.

I have found that it has not only been extremely fulfilling but rewarding as well. So many people have come up to me at awards, ceremonies, banquets, and conferences and said what did you do to get these great results? You rose right to the top of this company or whatever. I always thought it was a funny question because it’s not about what I did. It’s about the values that I’ve embraced and worked from a certain mindset.

Marylou: Okay. You know a lot of the audiences here listening are in what we call tech sales. They’re SaaS-based companies who sell widgets, who sell add-ons to some type of (I call it) the razor and the blade. There’s the razor, which is the main system, and a lot of these folks sell the blades, the different ways of improving workflow, of making life a little bit easier. We tend to lose sight of exactly what you’re teaching us.

My first question to you is, how were you able in the book to create a series of steps? You talked about the seven steps of selling by serving. What got you to encapsulate this what seemingly is more ideological than it is systematic? How did you come up with those seven steps? Let’s first hear for the audience what they are, and then how did you decide that those are the seven to increase your selling by serving attitude?

Clancy: I don’t know if I can remember them off the top of my head. The seven steps of selling by serving are introduction, rapport, discovery, solution presentation, agreement, objections, and I’m missing one.

Marylou: Okay, I can tell you as soon as I pull it up here.

Clancy: Okay, thank you. 

Marylou: But what you had was preparation, step one. 

Clancy: Preparation, there you go. 

Marylou: Engagement, rapport, discovery, solution, presentation, agreement, and objections.

Clancy: I think an important thing here and it’s interesting you brought up SaaS and tech people because one of the people who wrote a quote for the book, Chris Lansing, is in software tech sales, and he calls only on corporations with a billion dollars of revenue or more. He’s all over the country on an airplane or was, and he was part of the focus group when we were putting together this platform. I brought in people for feedback on the messaging and Chris is a real bright guy in his 30s, super successful at what he’s doing. 

But he said to me, “I do not need another book about how to sell more stuff. I need something to help me reconcile what I do out there with my little house in Salida, Colorado, with the white picket fence, and the family and my brand-new son, because those two things are not connected.” He wants to feel like that work has a connection to his life, and I thought that was really great feedback that he had. I’m not saying in any way that because I moniker myself the sales philosopher, not a sales trainer. But this philosophy, these values, and principles can exist within any framework. 

I’m not looking to replace any method that somebody might be already using or proficient in. I’m just saying that within that you can apply these principles to be more fulfilled in what you’re doing, have it have more meaning, and I would also suggest that ultimately you have better results than if you’re chasing the results directly. I always say you can slice and dice sales any way you want, but those are just what made sense to me.

Marylou: Interesting. Are they in a particular order or how did you present this? Do you want us to follow along? See, because here, Marylou is all about the process. […] I know this story in your book about Glen, which you can tell the audience about later, but is all about it’s seemingly haphazard and seemingly there was no process. There was a process, but it was more about intuition overlaying the process. So if I were to look at these seven steps, do I dive in at one first, is that a good course of action?

Clancy: Yeah, that’s a great question, Marylou and I would say so. I mean, to me, they are in sequential order. I think preparation is vital from my appearance to having the supporting material and knowing about my prospect. And to the rapport, I need to align, to have a human connection. 

Like you said, these are not computers. These are not associations. These are not corporations. This is somebody at the keyboard of a computer. This is someone representing an association. These are human beings. The pipeline is not an inanimate object. There are people there, and I think it’s important for us to keep in mind that there are human beings in there. Each one is unique. Each one has their imperfections and their genius areas. I think to go out there and have fun with that and really embrace that is important. 

So, yes, and then we just go on through. It’s all about them. The discovery is when I really begin to learn about this person, their business, their challenges, their needs, and what they’re really wanting to accomplish. Sometimes I help them with providing information that has nothing to do with what I’m selling. But it’s just being of service. It’s just becoming an asset. Then they’re already buying into the idea that Clancy is valuable. I want him around. This guy is working for me. He has my best interests in heart. 

The next thing you know, you get a call from that guy’s friend or that woman’s friend, and they want to talk to you as well and it just grows. The solution presentation is when you get right to it. Yes, we have something that can help you, and I feel it’s very important to put the agreement before the objections because I am not assuming that objections are going to take place.

If I’ve done a great job on the first steps, the agreement is so natural. I use a term, closing the sale. I don’t use it. I say gaining agreement because to me it’s so much more pleasant to think about, and I always want to keep this relationship open. Always open, never close. And then if there are objections, that’s a good thing. That’s something that we need to go back over and put to rest and answer those questions. But I’m not assuming that there’s always going to be objections that I have to overcome in order to close the deal.

Marylou: Right, and I really love the idea of preparation, engagement, rapport, and discovery, because I really feel today, in this selling environment, because we are lazy with all the tools we have, we’re expecting technology like artificial intelligence and deep learning to do these steps for us, which it doesn’t work that way. And a lot of what I am finding myself fighting against constantly with younger sellers or sellers who are focused more on goals versus dealing with humans is we don’t do those steps.

When you do those steps, it allows you—at a deep and meaningful level—to understand the day in the life of the person with whom you’re trying to gain agreement, which is further on down. I think that is something that I really love about the book is you take the time to go through that, and it’s four steps before you actually start presenting a potential solution.

Clancy: Yes. You said that beautifully, Marylou. Ditto on what you said. It’s what Clancy is all about and has always been about. I really believe that as we emerge from this COVID situation, whatever that looks like, whether we all get vaccinated and we can just go back to doing life as normal or whatever it is. But as things begin to return to some normalcy, and we can actually be more face to face with prospects and customers, I believe that there will be a much higher demand in the marketplace expressed through buying decisions of empathy on the part of salespeople and understanding what these clients have been through. 

Because we’re all going through this together—this COVID thing—all over the world. I believe that the people that I would call on and serve, or that you or anyone would call on and serve are going to quietly demand much more empathy, and they will need to know that you’re there on their behalf and acting in their best interest, not just there to earn a snappy dollar.

Marylou: Yeah, and I think, too, to your point, this has given us pause as a community to really reflect on what’s really important for us, and I think that no matter what industry—I know you come from the agriculture business, perhaps, but you’ve done other things. I’m in finances right now where we’re saving lives through digitizing a tissue, and then there’s the tech side where it may seem like it’s […] and all driven by leading and lagging indicators. 

But as to your point, somebody is still at the other end of this that is worried about the future, that’s worried about the future of the company, that wants to make sure that they can do their workflow properly, that they’re able to overcome obstacles, that they mitigate the risk, and all these are all of these are indicators for you from an empathetic point of view of how you can serve these clients and prospect.

Clancy: Yes, absolutely. One of the key messages of the whole beyond the method thing, and you talked about as we emerge from the COVID thing, we’re learning a lot. There’s a lot of great lessons that we can take forward from this if we so choose. I feel like what I really want to do with this is help the individual sales professional be fulfilled and happy in their work and that, of course, then bleeds over onto their life because when it’s all said and done, we’re not going to look back at our life and go, man, if I did just earn that one more trip to Cabo, that would have really been awesome. Or if I had just had that extra $100,000 in the bank, that’s really… Boy, I’m just sorry I didn’t get that.

But at the end of it all, if we look back and say, I didn’t really do what I came here to do. I didn’t help people. I didn’t have the focus on where it should have been. I wasn’t feeling on purpose and fulfilled. And that’s a terrible place to get to. I see a lot of people in sales burned out like you said, young people become overwhelmed, trying to “learn how to sell” as if there’s anything unnatural about helping people. That’s pretty natural and yet young people get all hung up in, oh, where am I? What step am I on here?

They get all nervous rather than just waking up every day to go help people. But my primary thing is to help people be more fulfilled. The opening line of my book says, “Making a sale is never a cause. It’s a result.” And the reason I put that there and it’s so important to me is if making sales a cause, then it is all about the numbers, the quotas, the commissions, the getting through the process and getting on to the next one, or whatever. 

The problem with that is it’s not possible to be fulfilled by doing that. But if it’s as the result, if a sale happens, agreement happens after preparation, rapport, discovery, engagement, and then the agreement happens, then you can feel good about a mutually beneficial business relationship and be fulfilled. 

The beautiful irony that I talk about in the book is that by being fulfilled, bringing that to everything you do and being adaptive like Glen Jones, not applying the same method to everybody, but learning what I need to do differently with this prospect than anything I’ve ever done before to get the most out of this relationship. More sales, more trips to Cabo, more awards and plaques, and money flow into your life than if you’re pursuing it as an end to itself. 

That’s absolutely been my truth over 30 years. I just want to share this with people. I’ve got pulled up right here, and I’d love to share the definition of fulfillment, and it’s my favorite one that I’ve found. It says, “Satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one’s abilities or character.” This is a big question, Marylou, about what are we really doing out there? We spend a big chunk of our life working and what are we really doing with that? 

The fulfillment part. The best way I can do it is an analogy that I use. I’m in Florida and I’m on vacation down there. I’m at the beach and somebody says, oh, you’re from Colorado. How are you enjoying Florida? And I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s great. We’ve really had a fun time at the beaches and everything else, and I can’t wait to see the Grand Canyon while I’m here.” They’re thinking of me like I’m some sort of a nut case. 

You won’t find the Grand Canyon in Florida because that’s not where it is, and the analogy is you will not find fulfillment in pursuing sales, commissions, quotas, and numbers because that’s not where it is. It’s in being of service to other people, forgetting about your commissions and quotas, helping people, immersing yourself in that, and then everything gets taken care of so nicely and so naturally.

Marylou: Like you say in the chapter of your book, “I looked at myself both as a salesman and a person. Instead of simply being a representative of a company, someone whose job it is to move product on behalf of my employer, I began to think of myself as something much more—a partner, a guide, a leader, a problem solver.”

Clancy: Yeah, absolutely and that is my truth. That’s all I can tell you. I have found that has brought me great satisfaction. When I get up and I’m still doing that. I’m still down in the trenches in sales, and I’ve been doing that for many, many years. And as you said, I’ve been in agriculture, which I love the industry. I’ve also worked in the energy industry and some others that are a little more dog-eat-dog and not as idealistic as American agriculture. 

However, whatever it is, when I wake up, I’m excited to go out. I look at it as I’m going to go make new friends, I’m going to go help people, and how can that be wrong? If I look in the mirror and say, I know I’m going out there to try to help people today. I’m not going out there to try and move the product, close a deal, get on to the next one, or any of that.” 

I’m just saying that I’m going out to help human beings and be a good person, and it’s just amazing, the network that gets built around that and the flow of referrals and how much abundance has flowed into my life in every area. From financial, to the quality of relationships, to the lifestyle I’ve been able to achieve. And I’ve seen that for other people, too, that have embraced the same principles such as sincerity, humility, and enthusiasm. These things are contagious.

Marylou: Yes, and a part of this is you mentioned early on in the call, you have a large referral network of people with whom they want to share their friends, their colleagues, their family members with you because they know that you’re going to be looking out for them uniquely as a person and not trying to sell them something that they don’t need, they don’t want, and they can’t use. It’s a meaningful transaction, a value-added transaction, and they trust that you’re going to do for them what you did for that person, and that’s what it’s all about.

Clancy: Yes, absolutely. I can’t tell you how many examples, and even if I don’t sell somebody something—sincerity to me means truth. It means when I sit down with a prospect, Marylou and I say, I am here to help you, to learn about your business and see if I can help you. They know it. You can’t fake that. You can’t manufacture it, and customers and prospects are sharp. 

They know if you’re faking it, they know if you’re really sincere and when I sit down and I say I’m here to learn. I’m here to help. I’m willing to admit what I don’t know. I’m willing to show you my weaknesses. They respond to that in a very powerful way, rather than trying to act like they know it all and assuming that my product’s going to just—if you don’t use it, you’re just missing the boat or whatever and it’s true. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been with a prospect and said, look, you’re doing very well right now, and these markets are depressed, and we’re in a challenging time, and I believe that the risk for you to change over to our product is greater than the benefit you could receive from it. I think we could help you, but there’s a lot of risk in any change. I recommend that you just stay doing what you’re doing, and if it’s okay, I’d like to stay in touch with you,

Darn, if the phone doesn’t ring a week later and says, my name is Bob and Wayne told me that he was visiting with you and he’s not going to use your product because he’s doing really well. But he said you were a real straight shooter, and I’m having all kinds of problems, and I’d like you to come talk to me because I think I could really benefit from your product. 

Not only that, I do business with that guy and then six months later, something comes up with Wayne where he really does have a need for something that I can offer and it’s a true fit. I ended up gaining his business, even though I told him on the front end I didn’t think he should buy my product because if I was him, I wouldn’t have wanted to buy it at that time. I just think these things are so powerful, and they make the whole experience fulfilling.

Marylou: Yeah. So I’m listening to this. I’m in the audience thinking, I would really like to explore this. What is the very next step? Besides buying your book and reading through it, are there additional ways that we can learn from you and get some ideas on how to apply this in our practice? Because a lot of times people need to have some type of guidance and I go back to that story now of Glen where you drove 1000 miles, go to […] class. When you were expecting a method and system, a process, and your first experience with it was less than what you thought, correct?

Clancy: Yeah, I went up there and after having attended this Jack Knox dog training clinic, who was a harsh Scotsman with a very much of a drill method. Every dog was put through the same paces and every dog did well and that’s good.

Then I go up for this sheepdog training clinic with Glen Jones, whose credentials far exceed Jack Knox’s and I think it’s a farce. The sheep running around and this out of control dog is chasing it. And instead of jumping in there,  taking control, and showing us his method, he starts telling stories and just jokes. 

I thought this guy’s a scam artist or something. And then right at the exact moment, he turns to the dog and says some things and the dog responds like the best dog I’ve ever seen and I’m like, what did I miss? What I had witnessed was what I call mastery. When I say method versus mastery, Marylou, I’m not talking about mastering some technique or method. I’m talking about self-mastery. 

So that what I learned from Glen over those days—and you’re right, it’s hard to put a statistical mark on it. You really can’t, but what I learned from him over watching him and talking to him over the next few days was his whole approach was, yes, there is a framework that you work within, which is the seven steps of selling by serving or whatever method a person chooses. But within that, the big question is, what do I need to do differently than I’ve ever done before to get the most out of the potential of this one unique animal—this sheepdog?

I took that to sales, so rather than meeting with Michelle, who’s my prospect and saying, well, I’ve got this box here and I’m going to put Michelle in it. Well, that might not be very comfortable for her to be in that box. But instead, I need to ask myself the question, what do I need to do differently with Michelle than with anyone I’ve ever dealt with before to get the most out of my relationship with Michelle? What’s the box going to look like that me and Michelle are going to build together? And that’s a big difference there. 

Back to your question about what’s the next step is I do a lot of one-on-one coaching, which is really great for salespeople trying to embrace this because it’s all situational, right? We’re going to talk about all these situations. The other thing I forgot about saying is when I talked to Michelle today, that’s a different Michelle than I was talking to six months ago. 

It’s constantly evolving. No two people are alike. No two situations are alike. What if Michelle’s husband was diagnosed with cancer? Or what if her children are out of the nest now and that’s an issue going on in her personal life? Or what if her business has taken a turn? Things change. It’s ongoing, and so it’s all situational. 

I do speaking and team coaching, and I do one-on-one coaching, and those things are all available. And the beauty of this being a new platform that I just launched in June is I’m doing a lot of exploring co-creation. If somebody was interested and said, yeah, I’d really like to talk to you about working with our team. Well, then we could just, again, build whatever box is going to have the most value for that team. I’m open to all kinds of different scenarios. I just want to help people.

Marylou: Very good. Again, the book is Selling by Serving: Find Fulfillment in Your Career and Sell More Than You Ever Thought Possible. Clancy Clarke, I’ll put all of your contact information on your webpage when we render this in digital format. We transcribe everything so people can take the notes, and I’ll be sure to put all those links in there for everybody. 

The process is beyond the method. It’s a platform that Clancy has developed. If you’re really thinking to take this to the next level and you’re at the point where you’re recognizing that adding more value. When you wake up in the morning, if you ask yourself like I do, how can I add more value? Then you’re ready for something like Clancy’s offering. Thanks so much for your time. I very much enjoyed this and best of luck with the book and with your platform.

Clancy: Thank you for having me. It’s been just truly a joy, and thank you again.

Succeeding at the top of the funnel requires some out-of-the-box thinking, and that’s what today’s guest has skill and experience with. Max Traylor offers his clients productized consulting services and is the author of a new book called Agency Survival Guide. In today’s episode, Max discusses the impetus for the book, how he got into productized consulting, and why he uses the agency framing to talk about his clients. 

Episode Highlights:

• The impetus for Max’s book
• How Max first started to get residual passive income
• Blending consistency and customizability
• What Max discovered interviewing people on his podcast
• Separating strategy from implementation
• Three stages to residual income
• Why Max uses the agency framing
• The importance of a healthy balance in clients
• How Max plans to socialize the book
• Where listeners can find Max’s book

Resources:

Max Traylor

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey, everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. I finally have a colleague friend of mine on the show today. With me today is Max Traylor. He is by far the best top-of-funnel person that I’ve had the opportunity to work with, strategize with. A little bit of here and there, but he is very, very out of the box thinking on all things that I call agency and inbound. I lump those together which I know is not correct and he’ll correct me on that. We’ve been ebbing and flowing here for the last few years on various accounts. He has written a book called the Agency Survival Guide. I’ve asked Max to come on the show today to talk about the book and also give us some tips with the COVID. 

Right now, I think we’re in month three of COVID, as this podcast is airing, maybe in month four now. We’re in civil unrest in the United States, so that gives you an idea of where we’re at here going forward, but we are still holding our podcast and moving on. I really liked some of the listeners who I know are interested in top-of-funnel to listen to what Max has to say about all things, attracting people to the way that we want them to come and engage with us so that we can get them further in the pipeline to close one. Without further ado, Max, welcome to the podcast.

Max: Thank you for having me and thank you for the kind words. I’ve never heard you say that, nor have I considered myself a top-of-the-funnel person, but you know what? I guess you’re right. I’ll take it.

Marylou: You are.

Max: I’ll tell you what. I don’t have a problem with the top-of-the-funnel. I don’t. It’s not a problem for me anymore. Working with you was a big part of that.

Marylou: Tell us about what was the impetus around the book. The last time we spoke, there was a book in your head or maybe it was always there and I didn’t know.

Max: I have invested four times previous to this time with the book and four times I have failed to write a book. A while ago, I promised my grandfather who’s 95 now that I’d write a book because he was always telling me to write things down. I’d always come to his house after work at the agency and talk about new ideas. Basically, every time I was there, he said well, you have to write this down. You have to write a book. Finally, I promised him. 

He’s an old guy. I don’t know how long he’s going to be around but I made it. We did it. We made the deadline and we got it out there. But I guess it started when as a kid, I would walk into my dad’s office because he would always work from home. I’d asked him where do you make the money? He realized that I thought that he was printing money in his office. I thought he was manufacturing the dollar bill.

He said Max, you can’t print money. That’s illegal. I have a digital scalable residual business model. I was five so I had no idea what that meant and then he would look at me and he would just say it just means you do something once and you make money forever. Oh, that’s interesting. Can we go to Disney World now? But that became my lullaby. 

I guess the number one thing that he taught me was that if you put your personal life first, you will make certain decisions about your business that are out of the box and benefit your personal life. To him, it meant that he didn’t have any products on a shelf so we could leave whenever we wanted. He needed to have systems so that his business was scalable. When he sold something, he wanted it to pay him forever. That’s what […]

Marylou: Great mantra. Residual is a word we don’t use very often. We use scalable. We use repeatable, but residual sounds very lofty.

Max: It is lofty and has lofty results. The result was I got to see my dad all the time and we went to Disney World a lot. I never forgot about that. Anyway, long story short. Early in my career, I wanted to run a marketing agency. I was into marketing. The professional services model was about the opposite of the digital scalable residual. It was a grind, and it ground me up. 

Accidentally, we productized one of our strategies. We took a content strategy that we were delivering as a service. We started to do group workshops around that intellectual property. We began to license it to other agencies all around the world. Lo and behold, I started to get residual passive income from these licensing fees if people that I had taught how to use my system on the other side of the planet. They would wake me up in the middle of the night with an email from PayPal saying, here’s $2000. See you later.

I realized after a year or so of this happening that I didn’t want to run a marketing agency. What I wanted to do is find people that had these systems, had these methodologies but were working in the grind-yourself-to-death business model of professional services, not knowing about these digital scalable residual options like group workshops, online courses, licensing programs, just ways that you could impact more people with the same or less effort.

That book is about it. How to productize consulting services, and do other things better too. It’s a collection of my story and learnings, and 12 interviews from some of the most influential people I’ve interviewed on my show. Was that a good answer to your question?

Marylou: That’s a great answer and I love the idea of productizing services. I think a lot of us think, even in my business, that each client is unique. Therefore, you can start with a baseline of frameworks, of methods, of systems, but it always morphs into a one-off type of situation. I’ve learned over the years—I’ve been consulting now for 33 years—that you can start with a baseline and very many of these accounts and projects and there are some nuances to it where you are perhaps living off of the framework, but everything in my world, my entire system is numbered. As you remember the […]

Max: I will never forget it. Hold on and you are productized. You have that. You have a periodic table of elements like it’s there. There’s customizability (if that’s even a word). I was always very impressed by the work that you’ve done, so you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Marylou: I do and I think it’s because I’m trained as a programmer that we were taught early on. In fact, I have some colleagues I’ve worked with for a very long time now who laugh because they know, if you do something more than once, chances are, it can be programmed because that’s how I was raised.

Why always look for how can I systematize something and you may not have the entire piece of the puzzle, but you’ll have enough of it so that it’s 85% there as a system, a method of framework and then if you want to use consulting services, coaching services, or advisory services, that is the additional 15% but you can set it up so that it’s a do-it-yourself.

I have three programs, I have to do it yourself, do it with you, and I used to have to do it for you before I went to the other side of life and now I’m working on a three-year project with a company in Denmark. I’m no longer consulting but if I were to have a do-it-for-you model, then we would basically take an outsource and do the work internally, and then provide the results. It’d be more of an at-risk type of engagement. You and I both love the at-risk side of life. That I remember about you.

Max: Things have gotten more risky in the immediate past. We’ve made some changes in how we work but to your point, I do get that pushback a lot from people saying no, we don’t want to productize. Our clients expect custom strategies and everything we do is custom. The way it was explained best to me is, well, what if Apple did that? What if Apple said you know what, every time we make an iPhone, we’re going to talk to Marylou and we’re going to figure out exactly what it should be made out of, what shape it should be, and all these things.

No, no, the hardware, the systems in the iPhone are consistent, but it is tailored to the individual. That’s the App Store. That’s all the apps that are put on it. Those are your settings. There’s always an element of consistency, of predictability, of guarantee, and then there’s the application of that system to the individual, which makes it customized, which makes it valuable. You need both.

Marylou: You do need both. I think as you said, you’re talking hardware, but the framework of professional services and the services you provide. If you were to sit down and actually diagram it out on a back of a paper napkin, you would come up with some chunks, buckets, and categories and tag them. What we do is when you first think about services it’s like walking into a library where all the books are all over the floor.

What we do with those services is we create our own card catalog system, so miraculously the books fly on the right shelves, you know where things are, you know how to go down the history aisle, and what shelf something is on. That’s what we do. We take this seemingly chaotic floor of books, and we put them all on the shelves. We organize them in a way that we can easily find what we were doing with the client.

We can take them along the path of how to navigate through our professional services themselves, and we give them options along the way of extreme hand-holding, advisory and consulting, or it’s good enough here that if you’re a go-getter, A-Lister, go for it and do it yourself.

Max: I think I’m going to have an offering called extreme hand-holding, by the way, and I will credit you with that. Let me know where to make out with that but I’m learning a lot through listening. The library analogy, I’ve now got that one, and the extreme hand-holding, that’ll be on my website next week.

Marylou: Okay, very good. The other thing in our industry, which all my audience knows, it’s all about stealing what works and testing and measuring to see if it works for us. We’re all about swiping other people’s stuff, trying it out, and making sure it works for us because that is the way the world when you’re creating sales messages for people who don’t know you, are not aware of you and you’re trying to put them across them over the line and advance them to having this engagement with you.

Tell me about the book in your interviews. What were the most striking things that you discovered as you interview people on your podcast?

Max: One of the major concepts to maintaining your status as a strategist is for a professional services company if they don’t recognize that they have a business or strategy in the business of implementation. Those two are separate things. It’s a separate perception. It’s a separate relationship. It’s a separate business model. They’re separate competitive pressures, but people tend to bundle it together.

The first set of interviews is really helping people understand the implementation side of any industry, whether doing things will always be commoditized. Especially in an age where training is globalized, and anybody can put on an online training course, the doing of things is going to get easier, there’s going to be more people in the marketplace that can do things, and thus the competitive pressure is always going to be on the rise.

When there are more people that can do the work, all of a sudden the processes and the systems to get the most out of those people become more valuable. I’ve heard the Bureau of Labor Statistics call the gig network, the industrial revolution of our time, and so selfishly I interpret that as okay, well who is making the most money during the Industrial Revolution? It was not the line workers. They had a job, but it was not the line workers that were getting rich. It was the people that said, hmm, maybe I’ll make, I don’t know, an assembly line, a system, a methodology to get the most out of this commoditized labor force. They made a few bucks.

Marylou: They did. Just a few.

Max: That’s number one is just separating strategy from implementation in your mind, and then when you start to sell strategy, the most important thing you can do is understand how to maintain your status as an indispensable partner to your client. That’s maintaining control, that’s having a system. That’s inviting leadership to co-create with you. I suppose it breaks down into how to establish yourself as an indispensable partner, and then maintain your status as an indispensable partner.

Marylou: Also give them those milestones along the way so that they understand where they are relative to the goal, because a lot of times we’re going to be attracting people who are very much like us and in my world, people want to know, where am I not necessarily relative to peers, although I have a quite a big contingent of clients who want to know how they’re doing based versus other folks, that’s because we’re salespeople, and that’s our nature, but it’s also about where am I relative to go?

Where am I on the success path? Am I beginning, middle, towards the end? Where are we? I think those are the milestones a framework can provide, along the way, along the success path. Here’s the quicksand that we’re going to come up against. No one could interpret what would happen with COVID, but because my clients were understanding the importance of different channels, most of them are able to quickly adapt away from the telephone and into another channel and still maintain the level of workload.

Now granted, I’m not going to travel or the industries that were heavily affected necessarily, but the phone just went dead overnight. For those clients that were very reliant on the telephone, we quickly had to pivot into another channel, because they had the sales conversations already bucketize and ready to go. It was just a matter of changing the channel underneath it and leveraging digital channels versus analog channels in this particular case that we did.

I think that the beauty of a framework is that you’re actually getting an understanding at a deep level, how to maximize your return on effort. You and I have talked about this over and over again, and also to be able to multiply the result of your effort with the same amount of hours 2X, 4X, 5X, 10X results, and because we had that flexibility we were able to quickly switch (in this case) channels of distribution and still maintain the integrity and also maintain the volume that we were looking for results.

Max: Yes to those. You did nail part four of the book, The Roadmap to Residual Income. There are three stages. One is to deliver it yourself as a consulting service. Two is to be able to facilitate that process with a group of people, and three is to be able to get someone to pay you to do it for their clients.

You’ve got consulting, facilitation, and licensed income back to my story about licensing the IP that I had to other people, they went out, they sold it, they deliver it, and I make income off of that. That’s the final stage but back to what my dad taught me. You start with your personal life, what do you want your personal life to look like? That final stage isn’t the final stage for everybody. It’s not in their life plan.

They might get everything they want because they love teaching people. They might stop at that facilitation stage, and really embrace speaking gigs and deliver one-to-many, but still doing it themselves. As you said, I think if you have the system in place, you’re then able to tailor it to what people really want out of life. It’s been fun.

Marylou: I bet and I’m really curious about the word agency, why the word agency to encapsulate what it is that you do?

Max: You mean my ideal customers?

Marylou: Because the subtitle of the book is how to really package up your professional services. Why do you frame that in something called an agency?

Max: It was really hard to choose honestly because my best clients identify as consultancies. I had to make a decision and I guess I defaulted to the agency because they need the most help. This book isn’t an instructional guide to doing it. This book is a collection of stories to really give people the motivation and the understanding of what’s possible.

Marylou: Okay, got it. Usually, people who gravitate to you are people in agencies who deliver products and services to their clients like resellers.

Max: People that helped their clients grow their businesses.

Marylou: Right, but in reality, a solo practitioner, a lawyer, a financial services person could take the teachings from this book, because they are their own agency, so to speak and apply it to that.

Max: I would be a hypocrite if I just called it how to productize consulting services because I am a big fan of focus and I do teach that to all of my clients. You’re right. I have people come to me and say, hey, I read your book. I have clients that are law firms. I have a client that moves biotech companies. I have clients that are totally unrelated, but that’s what tends to happen when you focus because you get so much traction in your focus area that you become more referable, and people almost feel they’ve won something like you’ve let them into a secret room. When they’re like, hey, I know you only work with agencies, but could I pay 25% more maybe you could consider me? Well, maybe we’ll figure that out. Yeah, maybe we could do something.

Marylou: It’s funny. You’re narrowing that niche, but in reality, it does apply and you people can see through that, especially when you’re offering these what I call levers of facilitating workshops, information nights, one on one coaching. You mentioned speaking and now that’s morphed into virtual speaking, but the frameworks themselves are always there that you can teach and reteach. That’s the beauty of it.

What I love about it is if you are working with a lot of students, in my case I do, then you’re getting feedback on delivering your service to a larger audience. One of the biggest things, downfalls of the work that I do, if you want to call it a downfall is that I’ve only really had three to five clients a quarter, and that was all I ever worked with.

In the big scheme of the pie, I’m working with a very small sliver of selected clients (if you’d want to put it that way), where in reality I would love to test my methodologies to the wide net. The guppies, the minnows, the smaller, but this is a way you can do that and take a very expensive offering and package it for this residual annuity while-you’re-sleeping type of income and still serve the world. That’s the beauty of it.

Max: I think a healthy balance is important. The client that pays you an arm and a leg that you’re working with one on one is such a rich source of really in-depth information. You really experience it and can live it with them. Plus when they pay you an arm and a leg it means they’re really bought in. They’re your ideal customers.

When you’re delivering one to many, that’s the experiment. You get a larger volume of information, you start to figure, oh, it’s great for this group, it’s bad for this group, here are the mindset characteristics that we should be looking for, and it’s all a part of the journey. Who knows what delivery format is going to be most attractive to you and in your case, it does change over time.

What you love when you’re 30 might not be what you love when you’re 50. A world crisis might change your view on things and the opportunity to move somewhere, live a life you never thought you would. You have to have the systems in place to be able to quickly deploy it in new ways. That’s why I wrote the book so people would do that.

Marylou: Wonderful. What’s next for you? When’s the book coming out or is it out officially now?

Max: We’re in a stage of collecting reviews. As I have heard, those are important before doing a formal launch of the book, but you could certainly get the book. It is on Amazon, Agency Survival Guide. I did make it available for free on my website. It came out during COVID so I just figured, look, it’s here and if you like it, you could buy it. It does exist. What was the other question? What’s next?

Marylou: What’s next? How are you going to socialize it to the world?

Max: Being a student of Predictable Prospecting and intentional pipelines, I have been able to generate conversation. I have a team of researchers. They know exactly who I’m looking for. Down to their previous career and how they were educated. I know that much about people’s reactions to what I have to say. For example, agency owners with creative backgrounds now usually don’t work out.

Marylou: Not so much.

Max: Agency owner with financial backgrounds, economic backgrounds. They’re like, yeah, productize that’s perfect. Operations background they’re like […] from this? You can’t search for that, you need a human being. So I have a team of researchers that goes and finds these people and over the years I’ve been able to generate conversations with about 20%. Now my plan I’ve got a box of books here. I’ve got my coasters which function as business cards.

I’ve got the written word. I’m going to handwrite. I’m actually going to handwrite people’s notes about why my researchers came across them, why I think that we should talk about what they have to contribute. I’m going to send people books in the mail. No stone will be left unturned. This is stage two of three, stage three is showing up at their house and knocking on their door and saying, no, you don’t understand. I paid someone to find you and we’re going to talk.

I think it’s really intentional and that’s always been my approach, especially after working with you. That’s what’s next with the book that we have found after COVID. What we were forced to do is create an offering that was faster, more essential. What we found is that that experiment really taught us how to accelerate the pipeline at any time. There were some valuable lessons that were learned. Our business model hasn’t necessarily changed, but it has been improved, in that we’ve got a new accelerant to the business, something new up our sleeves, and it taught us that out of our whole methodology and everything that we’ve created, there are in fact, one or two things that that can generate 90% of the results and that’s really special to find.

Marylou: You’re also a student of testing and measuring, putting quality into the pipeline to begin with. If some of the audience listened to you, you have researchers that know what they’re doing. You’re not just purchasing a list. You’re going after the people at a deep and meaningful level. The ones that you […]

Max: Which doesn’t exist. For what I know I need, the list doesn’t exist.

Marylou: The ones that have a higher probability of closing. The Predictable Revenue formula has not changed. That’s the highest probability of closing which is yield with the fastest amount of time that you can add value, get the sense of urgency, get them close, that’s a cycle of time, and then the deal size going through. If you adhere to those parameters and put quality in, you are assured a certain level of success.

How you take it further and keep fine-tuning it is through testing and measurement. You do everything that I originally talked to you about and continue to try to advance beyond where most people would ever consider, so I love that. I love that. That’s great.

Max: Now I know where I got all this because I was like, why is my brain wired? Oh, yeah. I read your book and met you. That’s what happened.

Marylou: You can be someone and but then you have that experience that may tweak other areas that you might have left a little lagging, dormant, or you had to consider and you’re more open to it because you’ve heard it and now you’re ready to apply it. That’s the difference between people who I think are further along that level of greatness is that they take a piece of information. They use repetition to apply it frequently and then they measure the performance that puts their ego in their pocket.

They’re not going to put a lot of stake into it, but they are going to try it to see if it works, or it’s not, go or no go. Yes, no. We don’t like maybe, we don’t like hope.

Max: Well, then for the listener, let me be very clear. The most disturbing thing that I have found since meeting you and actually being aware of it and conscious of it, is almost no one that I talked to has a physical list of the people that they want to work with. They don’t have it. Show me a list of all the accounts you want. If I could snap my fingers, you’d want to get accounts, so show me the list of people that you want. Everyone looks around and they go, well, we have like personas. No, no. Where are their names?

Marylou: Physical, tangible, I want to get my arms around accounts.

Max: Who can I call for you? I’m not going to do that. That’s the most disturbing thing because that’s the first step to being intentional is just knowing who you want.

Marylou: It’s disturbing but it’s just a beautiful thing to hear because it’s something we can all correct.

Max: Yes, it’s very easy to do. You just tell someone else in your organization, go get me a list of 20 people that we want to work with. That’s it. Send them. You go […]. You’ll definitely be in a better position than you are today.

Marylou: Exactly. Don’t be passive about it. I teach my students to be proactive. Give yourself permission to want to know your total serviceable market. Who they are, whether they’re existing clients or new clients, whether you’re selling existing products or new products. Those are four different ways you can go with your list. You really want to focus on that and have that because of quality and quality out. Rule number one.

Max: Indeed. Also, we talked about on the show, Marylou, or are we out of time? I’m not sure.

Marylou: I think we’re out of time, but I wanted to once again promote and say thank you for attending the podcast and talking with me today. The book is the Agency Survival Guide. What’s the website, Max? We’ll put it on your page. What’s the website that they can look and see, download a free chapter on wondering or what do you have?

Max: They can download the entire book on my website. There’s the buy button and then there’s the download free button, you make the choice.

Marylou: Or donate.

Max: We’ll see how that goes. Hopefully, I will have internet in a couple of months. The website is maxtraylor.com.

Marylou: Maxtraylor.com.

Max: You’re probably looking at my name in the interview.

Marylou: Yeah, I’ll put it on your page. We do a page with your beautiful face and get everything on there, so we are ready to go. Anything else you want to share with the folks before we say goodbye?

Max: A hundred and fifty conversations have turned into opportunities and one quarter closed as sales. Seventeen new customers in 2019. That was my predictable pipeline.

Marylou: All right, good number. Love those waterfalls. You hear that everybody? Waterfalls are important.

Max: By the way, I don’t want that to change this year. I don’t want any more. I just want that exact thing to happen again, and we’re well on our way.

Marylou: And you’re happy about that. Very good. Well, thanks again for spending time with me, take care of that beautiful family of yours and we will talk to you later, Max. Take care.

Max: Cheers.

As you start to think about what marketing and sales might look like in a post-COVID-19 world, it’s worth considering how you can be more prepared for another similar type of event. We’ve seen that the world can change overnight, and that often means changing your message, strategy, and even the channels that you use to communicate with your contacts.

Kendra Lee is the founder and President of KLA Group out of Denver. Today, she joins the podcast to talk about the habits, workflows, tools, and other things that you can do on a daily basis that would prepare you for some event like this.

Episode Highlights:

• What type of work Kendra does with clients
• Why the work that Kendra does is important
• Leveraging the different technologies and channels available to you when you need to shift your message
• How the personas change when the message or channel changes
• What to do when you lose a channel or it becomes less effective
• Thinking strategically about the conversations that you need to have
• Involvement in the nurture sequence side of things
• Supporting sales reps
• Kendra’s favorite spots in the bottom of the funnel
• Kendra’s upcoming goals

Resources:

KLA Group

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Kendra Lee of the KLA Group. I’ve followed Kendra, has it been 20 years? Could that be right, Kendra?

Kendra: It absolutely could be.

Marylou: It could be, okay. I remember when I first signed up, I had a project management company called Telegenik. My first newsletter came from you on that email address so that’s a long time ago.

Kendra is the founder and President of KLA Group out of Denver and she’s a great resource if you need any type of sales and lead generation, or training, and specializing top of funnel mostly, prospecting. I’ll let her talk more about all of that but she’s a great resource.

As I said, I’ve had her newsletter. She does a weekly tip and bi-monthly newsletter that gets on her list. There are such great tips in those, especially if you’re into anything to do with business development you definitely want to follow Kendra. Welcome to the podcast today, Kendra.

Kendra: Thank you and what a lovely introduction. That was really nice, thank you.

Marylou: My pleasure. I’m a fan. 

Kendra: I know that we go back 20 years though.

Marylou: I know. If you’re listening to this, we were talking about maybe post-COVID which is a 2020 event that we’re all going through. We were talking about should this podcast be geared towards that, but I wasn’t sure if we’re going to be out of the woods by the time this airs or not.

What I asked Kendra to talk about are those habits, workflows, or those types of tools and things that you can do on a daily basis that would prepare you for something like this, an event like this. We were talking about even if your CEO or Director of Sales comes tomorrow and says, “Hey, we’re going to now focus on this vertical,” so you have to pivot over that way to the right instead of where you had been. The lane you’re in yesterday is no longer the lane. 

We’re experiencing that and the beauty of this, as Kendra was saying, is the business doesn’t really change because if you have the sales conversation, the skills, the habit, the workflow down then you can take any type of punches that come your way. Kendra, let’s start by demonstrating to the folks that are listening to the types of work that you have been doing with clients and why that work is so important in terms of reputable, consistent delivery.

Kendra: We work on two sides with clients. One is with the sales team on their prospecting and the other is with the marketing side. I’m running the lead generation activity that drives a portion of the lead sales team that wants to follow-up on. Both of those activities do prepare you for having to pivot because if you already have, let’s say on the marketing side, a consistent communication method that you’re using, then it’s a matter of changing your message. 

That’s what we had to do in the last month for all the clients whose lead gen we’re managing. We’ve had to go and switch what we’re talking about, but we already had the people who we’re talking to, we already know what our business is. We’re just shifting how we’re talking about it. Then, you look at the sales side and the same thing is true for […].

If you’re already prospecting and you have a prospecting discipline, then it’s just a matter of saying, “Okay, how do I push up my approach to whatever this new lane (as you called it) maybe?” But we’re still doing all the same things. We’re just switching what we’re talking about, really.

Marylou: Right. But with this particular event, for some of us, one of our main channels (i.e., for some people the telephone) has been significantly reduced in terms of results. Are you saying that not only do we have our sales message, our method, or your contacting, but is there also this leveraging the different technologies and pulling the different levers when you start to see something like what we’re experiencing now where some people are scrambling but because some people have covered both sides of the umbrella, like you with marketing and lead gen, and then there’s prospecting, so there’s leads coming in, but there’s also outbound prospecting going out, is it a matter of balancing the different channels? How does that work?

Kendra: Yeah, I think it’s a matter of using the different channels that are available to you. I am a firm believer that you have to pick up the phone so I never say, “Don’t use the phone.” Now, will our success be the same? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on who our target market is and how they have handled having to move to a new environment, in this case working from home. So, transferring their phone […] will get them. 

Still, what we want to do then is say, “Okay, if I can’t reach them by phone, what other ways could I get them?” We know we can get them by email. We’ve seen this surged in people who are using LinkedIn. I had one rep who said, “Ma’am, we need to be doing lots more on LinkedIn because I know I have my LinkedIn open and when I get bored that’s where I go.” Knowing as we do, when we’re trying to scope out how to reach a prospect, knowing what the prospect might be using and paying attention to right now. Using other channels like email, like LinkedIn, what about video and sending a video email. That’s another way. 

If you and your database have cell phone numbers and the people that you are targeting are the types that you should text. You’re not going to call their cell, you could text. There are definitely different approaches and I look at it as we have to put on our creative hats and say, “Well, if we couldn’t have normally reached somebody by the phone, what would we have done?” We might as well drop by. We still would have tried email. We might have tried LinkedIn. We just have to start thinking more broadly about how we could potentially reach out. 

A fun tidbit for you because reps (in many cases) are spinning, trying to figure out, “Well, you took away my primary way of reaching people, now what do I do?” We actually wrote up 60 different ways that you could prospect remotely because people were just stuck. I think when you have to pivot, it’s stepping back, putting your creative hat on, and saying, “Wait a minute. It’s fundamental. This is still prospecting and lead gen. How else might I reach somebody?”

Marylou: That’s a great point. The other thing is I’m curious when you set up clients and you’re working on getting the campaign—for lack of a better word—together. Would these ideas about these channels come up as you’re defining the personas, the people with whom the audience that you’re going to be having these conversations with, is in part of that talking about how they consume information? In this case, that’s going to switch when one thing gets taken away which is not going to the office anymore. 

You’re kind of covered there too because I would imagine that you have this checklist about who’s the audience? How do they consume information? Where do they like to hangout? What types of challenges are they experiencing that we can solve for them? There’s a whole checklist you go through in the form of a bio persona or a prospect persona that would have that channel information on it as well, correct?

Kendra: Absolutely. You have identified who is the target persona, a little bit of background about them, and what is the best way to reach them. The things they care about may shift, so it depends on why you’ve been asked to pivot. We’ll use COVID-19 is an example. Everybody in the world was asked to pivot, but we see pivoting happening all the time. Think about compliance. All of a sudden, a government entity comes out with a whole new set of requirements and if your target market has to achieve those, all of a sudden, what that persona cares about have shifted because of the new compliance regulation.

Marylou: Right, and the most recent one is GDPR in Europe. It limited our ability to send emails unless they opt-in. Websites had to let them know that they have cookies and all of that good stuff.

Kendra: Exactly, and all companies in Europe actually had to respond to that. If you have anything at all to do with GDPR from the business perspective and after you were calling people about it, it gave you a whole nother topic to talk about, and then you just apply that to the persona and why they would care about it.

Marylou: Right. In events like this, when we are losing or we have a channel that is not as effective, is it customary that you amp up other channels, or do you typically keep the touches similar? What are you finding when we have these types of events?

Kendra: We have something that we call a Bloodhound Follow-up Strategy. You can access prospects and it follows that rule that we’ve all heard that it’s going to take a minimum of nine attempts to reach someone and it uses the combination of approaches to reach a prospect over a 31-day period. When we stepped back to look at everything being shifted, we can’t necessarily reach people as easily through the phone. How does that change our approach?

The number of touches did not change. The frequency of touching did not change because we’re still trying to reach people, so we still want to have a valuable conversation and ideally, we still want to sell something although the way we approach it is going to be softer right at the moment. Our frequency and number of touches did not shift. What shifted is what we were using, the approaches. 

The phone is still in every one of them because you can still reach some people. To your point, with GDPR, either we’re going to get them through something like LinkedIn or hopefully we were able to access them through email prior to the way we have their permission. Otherwise, now we’re trying to attract them through things like search engine marketing So, the phone is still there. Email is there. We increased LinkedIn, so we changed up how we were using different strategies and at which time but kept the number of touches and the frequency.

Marylou: We did something very similar. As you know I’m on hiatus for a couple of years here working with one client, which has been a blast. What we’re doing is we’re leveraging the technology that we have to only schedule phone calls for those people who have engaged with our email content or our social content. If we then click through, for example, some type of URL, paper, or downloadable something, then that’s ticked in the software to say, “Hey, this person has engaged. I’m going to put them in your calling queue for you now.”

Usually, what we used to do is touch, too, will be a phone call for all of the people that are members of our sequence or whatever we’re doing, and now, we don’t need to reach all 100. What we’ll do is only talk to those people who have engaged, which brought that 90-some odd number down to something like 40, which is much more manageable. It’s probably smarter to do anyway, so it’s forced us to really think about strategically how to have these conversations, when to have these conversations. The other thing, the beauty of that is we pick up where the content asset left off. If we know they watch a webinar, we pick up right from there in our next conversation with them.

Kendra: Exactly right. Those we refer to as marketing-qualified leads. They have engaged with you in another manner, social or your web content as you said and now we know what they’re interested in. It can have a different level of conversation with them. Now we’re calling to find out, well are they interested in just finding out about it? Or are they interested and actually do something about that topic? 

Marylou: Yes. It’s just a beautiful thing to think about. It’s a warmer conversation, so from a psychological mindset point-of-view, you’re already beyond the cold process and are taking off where the prospect is in his mind. Where he’s at in his mind is where we start the conversation. It’s a more synergistic way of having conversations with prospects.

It’s funny. It’s great that this has happened in so many ways because we have had to think about the implication of what this means for revenue, for goals, for opportunities that we’re trying to generate, for appointments that we’re trying to set.  It really opened up a wonderful brainstorming among (at least) my team and came up with some great things to do. Some fun work from home. Campaigns to get end-users activated and joining in the conversation. I think a lot of is the cultural thing of we’re stuck in our house now and we still crave the connection in some fashion. It’s been a really great experience in so many ways.

Kendra: One thing I would share, think about is when we are watching what prospects are clicking on or paying attention to in social—Twitter is an example—if somebody has clicked through, let’s say you’ve written a fabulous blog post, you posted it on Twitter, they click through, and you can see that, know that when you call, they may or may not remember your name. 

The advantage that you have is that that person you know cares about a specific topic and it’s not as critical that they remember that it was you they clicked through and from Twitter as much as you know the topic that was interesting to them. You can still have that conversation. In LinkedIn, if they read it, I think there’s a greater chance they’ll remember your name because LinkedIn doesn’t move at the pace of Twitter. 

I just want to make that point because a lot of reps, when they follow up on leads that come from what we would call campaigns, are expecting that the prospect will remember them, the company, what they read. If you think about how quickly you read things, they may not remember exactly who wrote it or where it came from. The key takeaway is going back to the personas, now you know what to talk with them about or what you want to reach them about, whichever method you are using.

To your point, it’s much more targeted when we do that and we have a higher likelihood of reaching them. […] confident when we call that it doesn’t throw us off if they don’t remember our name. 

Marylou: Exactly. That’s great advice. I have a question about the fact that you help the sales team with prospecting and you help the marketing side with lead gen. When you create that MQL, are you also watching it flow through the pipeline to an opportunity, or do you ever engage again when that lead is getting too close but didn’t close and it needs to come back in for nurture? Or are you focused mostly on the funnel generating the MQL and do not normally get involved with the nurture sequence side of things?

Kendra: We get involved with the nurture sequence as well and we look at it as there are different actions that you need to take, depending on where a prospect (what I say) falls out of.

Marylou: Yeah, leaks out.

Kendra: Right. If it leaks out, where that is, is how you want to attempt to get them to re-engage again. We look at the top of the funnel and then we do want to see it go away through to close. There are so many exciting things you can do, Marylou, to keep prospects engaged even when they’re fully engaged with a sales rep. There are some exciting things that you can do to get that prospect even more interested or see more value even beyond what the rep is doing. It’s pretty exciting with all the different ways that you can use to lead generation strategies of today.

Marylou: I think that you hit the nail in the head. That’s the one area where I’m sure people sitting in the audience are thinking, “Once I’m in getting to close where they turn off my lead gen process, I don’t really think about nurture,” but we have data that shows that someone could come through the pipelines three, four, five times before they make that buying decision. If you let them go and don’t nurture, you are just taking money and throwing it out the window. 

Kendra: Exactly. Why would you not support your sales team just because it became an opportunity and it’s now in the sales rep hands? Why would you not nurture that prospect while they’re in the sales pipeline? Why would you not have them come to your webinars or send them interesting content while the sales rep is talking to them?

Marylou: Right. Truth be told, how many of your clients have actually taken it to that level and used that as a strategy. For every ten clients, how many actually do that?

Kendra: I would say one-tenth because they don’t see the value. We actually had a client turn it off and we said to him, “Do you realize how many prospects you have in your pipeline going through this?” His comment was, “I don’t like that it’s telling me I need to call people at a certain time.”

Marylou: Spoken like a true account executive.

Kendra: Like, “Oh my gosh. Your contact is engaged and all these things, and now it pops up that it’s time for you to call. How much warmer do you want someone to be?” We find only those companies that are operationally mature in their sales process are the ones that see the true value of using campaigns during the actual sales process. Focus at the top of the funnel, Marylou. All they want to do is get more leads, “Get me more leads. Get me more leads,” instead of, “Wait a minute, we got the lead. We did all that hard work. How about we win the lead?”

Marylou: Yes, and the numbers are staggering. I’ve been tracking this because this is what I do. We’ve increased the close rates from the standard and sometimes doubled and tripled the close rates when we institute a nurturing program at the bottom of the funnel.

Think about this. Our lead gen is a rocket ship and we can still turn it on to produce 2x if we want. If we (a) produce more quality opportunities to our top of funnel lead gen, and (b) increase the close rates and our bottom of our funnel lead gen, what does that tell you? Revenue, revenue, revenue.

Kendra: Growth, growth, growth. Yup. Margin, margin, margin even.

Marylou: I know. We have the tools in place to do this nurturing, people. It’s there. We use it at the top of a funnel. Why would we not try this? Do you have favorite spots in the bottom of the funnel? I know there are a million methodologies of getting to close, but are there certain spots where you can see the value of not only close rates but velocity? Pipeline velocity, things close faster. Is there a favorite spot that you like to start clients with?

Kendra: Yes. Prior to the proposal. They are not receiving the proposal yet. You start to nurture them and really get them excited before you give them the proposal. Another favorite spot is after the proposal especially if you’re in a competitive situation. You stay in front of them because oftentimes, once you deliver the proposal, a prospect may say, “I got two other companies that I’m talking to,” or, “We need to think about it,” or, “We have to go to the board.” or, “We’ve heard them all.” Then the rep often will sit back and say, “Well, okay,” and wait.

There’s silence until the rep reaches out and says, “Hey, have you had that board meeting?” or, “Did you guys get together?” Before the proposal to create the excitement and then after the proposal to stay in front of them are the two that we see will make a difference.

Marylou: That’s great advice. I love the example of the math of if I have a $100 opportunity and two people close two of them, $100 each. Two types of hundred are $200. If I increase the close rate to four, then now I just doubled my take home. But if I do that plus focus on lead gen on top of the funnel and put 100 more people in, and increase the close rates, then the math is just so easy to see. It cost us nothing because we’ve already put in the engine to do this automated or personalized, but this consistent touch, this consistent rhythm, and all we need to do are build playlists prior to the proposal and after the proposal. We build another little playlist that gets them engaged. Now they’re really into understanding more about the product.

It’s even easier to put that content together because usually marketing has a ton of content for that level of awareness and they usually have content available up the top of the funnel because we’re trying to build a sense of urgency and make people aware that we’re out there. It boggles the mind, but I’m glad that you’re on top of that, Kendra.

Kendra: Yes, we are. It’s an interesting conversation with clients so that they can understand what that real value is because they’re so focused on the lead generation.

Marylou: Yeah, I totally get it and my wish for all of you listening right now is that the lightbulb has gone on and that you really look at this as an additional way to love your clients. Love your prospects. Get them to love you. Get them to trust you more.

This hand-holding during the cycle is an indicator of how well they’re going to be taking care of when they’re a client of yours. This is also building loyalty. It’s building lifetime value. The softer benefits of doing these types of campaigns mid and bottom of funnels. I’m glad you’re focused on that. We don’t write about it very often, either. Do you write and talk to people about it a lot, Kendra?

Kendra: I talk with people about it frequently. I don’t write about it. 

Marylou: I haven’t read a lot about it either because we are focused on prospecting and we are focused on getting to close, but not the rhythm to close and that work ethic or habit. I don’t even know how to describe it, but we’re the follow-up engines at the top of the funnel. We are taking that follow up engine mentality, but just oozing it with value as we touch into the getting to close part of the funnel. Why not? Let’s do it. I’d love that.

Kendra: I do.

Marylou: What […] for you now? What are your goals coming up once we get out of the abyss of staying at home?

Kendra: For us, it’s exciting to see how our clients are shifting some of their solutions, so helping them get that message out as they are shifting and allowing them to continue it to be successful so that’s part of the lead generation side. Then at the sales side, a big piece that we’re doing is linking what happens with the marketing qualified lead when it goes to sales and why it is not closing. 

We’re taking a deeper look at what is hindering a sales rep from closing a higher percentage of the leads from a […] perspective and we’re starting to link before we even do their lead generation, where they may have challenges within the sales team when a lead is passed. So, it’s not just, here’s the lead, go call it. That’s partly what I’m explaining before about how reps will have a separate expectation when they get that lead and they may handle it differently because they feel like, “Oh, a person should know me. So they should take my call.”

What we’re starting to do is before that lead ever passes, look at the sales team and say, “Are they ready?” and if they’re not, what needs to be fixed in the process? or the systems? or the skills themselves? That’s where we’re headed.

Marylou: We have similar goals. We’re really trying to understand recycled leads, closed, lost leads, or leakage at the top of the funnel. If we don’t reach the people that came in, we’re looking at those workflows and see if maybe we should change the channels around. The delivery, message, and lesson here is that we’re constantly measuring and testing, and constantly iterating and making this thing better. It’s never a ‘set it and forget it.’

That’s why it’s nice to hear that there are people like Kendra’s group out there to help us not only hone the message, but also the process of the message, and the delivery of the message so that we can continually eke out percent improvement over the long haul because yield which is the conversion rate, lag which is the cycle time, and the average deal size are what makes things predictable and that’s what we’re trying to do here, is build market share in some cases or product share. If you’re working with the base, but that formula is the formula we’re striving for. 

Kendra, thank you so much for your time today. How is the best way that people can reach you? Where do we go to find you?

Kendra: Through our website is the best way. We have all of our resources as well so klagroup.com. Content goes through there.

Marylou: All right and I will make sure on your page that I will put all these links and that there’s a ton of information out there folks on Kendra on the internet. Just type her name and prospecting and you got it.

Kendra: There you go.

Marylou: Thanks again. I very much appreciate your time.

Kendra: Thank you for having me.

Whether you’re new to sales or you’ve been in the game for a while and you’re looking for a way to achieve sales mastery, today’s guest has some ideas for you Simon Portwain is the author of a new book, Sales Icon: Selling in the Shadows.

Simon joins the podcast today to talk about some of the ideas that he covers in his book. Listen in to hear what he has to say about sales momentum, developing a sales journey plan, and transitioners for salespeople. 

Episode Highlights:

Why Simon was motivated to write this book

What sales momentum is

The framework around sales momentum

How sales journey plans develop

Where sales journey plans start

What influences sales activity

How momentum and journey are linked to transitioners

Finding your success formula

Resources:

Simon Portwain

Sales Icon: Selling in the Shadows – Amazon

Sales Icon: Selling in the Shadows – Barnes and Noble

Email Simon: simon@sales-icon.com 

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is a gentleman by the name of Simon Portwain and he has written a book that we are going to love to talk about today, it’s called Sales Icon–Selling In The Shadows. What’s really intriguing about this book is it’s for either the novice, the people in our audience who are starting to get into this thing called sales and getting an understanding of the preparation that goes into becoming a successful, reputable, and predictable sales professional. There are also some great tips in this book on how to continue to master your salesmanship and also to move these prospects and clients through the pipeline at a faster clip, we call that the pipeline velocity, and getting that initial conversation started and then getting to close.

Simon is gracious enough to spend time with us today and we’re going to talk about a few things from the book that we feel will resonate most with this audience. Simon, welcome to the podcast.

Simon: Thank you for having me.

Marylou: Tell me, what prompted you to write a book like this? I mean, it’s just full of such great information. What got you motivated to do something like this?

Simon: I think what motivated me the most, I’ve fallen into so many pitfalls in sales and made so many mistakes over the many years and I didn’t really want other people to fall into them. It wasn’t until I was promoted into more of a sales management position, I saw other peers making exactly the same mistakes. I helped them, I’m coaching them and developing them. I thought you know what, I can probably do more here. I can help a wider audience to avoid the same mistakes and actually to be successful. That was one of the real motivations I wrote in the book.

I didn’t actually start out with the plans to write a book. I’ve just started writing some stuff down like processes that I follow, things that I do, things that have helped me in my career, and then it developed into a book. I’m happy to say now that it’s published, it’s got my name on it, and I’m really happy about it.

Marylou: Yeah, and that’s available on Amazon. I’ll make sure that in the show notes I’ll give you guys all the links that you can purchase this book.

I love what you said about you don’t set out to write a book, I am definitely in that camp. When we did Predictable Prospecting which was released in 2016, that was the result of one of my clients who is my co-author, his name is Jeremy Donovan. He just strongly suggested that the work that I was teaching them, he hired me as a consultant, and the work that we went through over that weekend’s seminar was nothing like predictable revenue, it was an enhancement or an extension of predictable revenue. It became very obvious to him that I needed to write another book because I had taken, just like you, I had written down all these things, I had tried this out with clients, I worked through different scenarios, came up with a more enhanced plan, but it was in my head and not in a book.

I am very grateful that you took the time to do this because planning for us is usually done not necessarily with repetition, and we don’t really think of it as a process, or a system, or a framework. You’ve put that in a beautiful framework for us so that we can take things and work on them as we need them and then invent and create our own workflow.

Now, you mentioned in our pre-call that you wanted to talk about three things that you felt would be most impactful for this audience. Let’s go through each of those and why don’t you help us by understanding the three that you want to talk about and why you selected these three knowing who our audience is so they get that reason why they should lean in and listen to what we’re going to be talking about in the next 30-45 minutes.

Simon: Sure. Three areas which I think would really add value to the people listening today, the conversation about sales momentum, what we call a sales journey plans, and then a topic that here in the UK, I call them transitioners for salespeople. I know in the past you’ve called them a different term of sequencing and cadencing. Really what I want for the message that we send for the people listening to have something to take away. I want them to be able to listen to sales momentum, sales journey plans, transitioners, and for them to be able to apply it later that day, the next day, the next week. That’s kind of the motivation for talking through the three topics.

Marylou: Okay, so let’s start with sales momentum, what do you mean by that, and what is the framework around sales momentum?

Simon: Brilliant. If I set the scene, I had the circumstance a few months ago. I was coaching a young lady, she had come to me with a nice opportunity she was working on. She just finished the first meeting and I asked her the simple question of how are we going to drive this opportunity forward? and after asking this question I received a rather blank expression from her. She didn’t know. She did not know what she should do to move the opportunity forward and it’s quite common that I see that. Not a very pre-sales person but of many, they don’t necessarily think about what we can use to push to the optimum position to make that sale.

One of the topics I discussed with her and I’ve talked about with many is the concept of sales momentum. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the World’s Strongest Man before, it’s this Goliath man doing a bunch of different events of lifting weights and those types of things. One of the events really demonstrates sales momentum perfectly and that’s the event of the truck pull. What they do for this event is these Goliath men put this harness on their back and they try to pull a truck over a hundred meters, or something like that, I don’t know how they do it. What we’ll notice is when they pull this truck, the moment where they lose momentum is the moment that that truck doesn’t move again.

That’s exactly the same in sales. In any sales opportunity, we want to build momentum and maintain that momentum. The moment we lose the momentum, the chances are we’ll lose that sale. That’s why sales momentum is so integral for any salesperson out there. The real imperative factors to consider are that we want to build and maintain that momentum but also time that momentum to a crescendo. In particular, I know you’ve got a musical background yourself Marylou, but that crescendo is the end of the sales process, is where we want to be using our most powerful sale steps that have the best chance of influencing that sale. If we use them early on, the chances are they’re not going to have a level of influence we need or expect them to happen.

That’s kind of the importance of a sales momentum, and that really links to part of the book that we talked about which is sales journey plans. I’ll go back to that example of that young lady I was working with. The advice I gave her was to put together a sales journey plan. All of that sales journey plan is a plan for the activity we’re going to use from the start date which is where we’re on now. It’s off to we’ve had that first meeting or the first conversation on the phone and the end of the opportunity close window which any proficient salesperson should uncover and find out early on because then they know the two parameters. They know where they’re starting and they know where they need to finish.

How will sales journey plans develop is that we fill that timeline with activities or what we call transitioners or what you would depict as sequencing, cadencing with powerful, influential activities within the sales journey plan.

Marylou: Now, are these sales journey plans built by a stakeholder, or is there a general one for an account, or what have you found is a good place to start? I know most of my clients and most of my audience, probably, don’t really do these types of plans, these accounts attack funnel journey type of plans. What do you recommend would be a good starting point in terms of segmentation in order to do your first plan?

Simon: The blueprint of most sales journey plans will have much of the same makeup but some will be different. That depends on the buyer you’re conversing with and it depends on the opportunity that you have. I love one of your business terminology, Marylou, of a jump client. I love that, I take that all the time and I use that for people. I can’t remember how you say it when they flutter their eyelashes, I think that’s the terminology you use but I love that. 

If you can imagine, if I had a prospect I was working with who I consider to be a jump client, I’d realize early on that they could be influential in my success, in my sales role in general, in my year’s quotes that I’ve got to hit. My sales journey plan for them could be quite different than it may be for one of my more average to smaller perspective clients. Definitely, the makeup will often be the same where we use different activity steps, what we call transitioners, to drive that opportunity towards a sale.

The key thing to remember here is that not every activity you use will have the same level of influence. If I just use an example on that topic, if I take the simplicity’s sake that I’m working with a prospect, I have an opportunity and I have one competitor competing for the same opportunity. I wish it would happen, it never does, but let’s just say the simplicity sake I’m competing with one person. If I follow the process, I use four different activity steps and all of the four activity steps are let’s say a phone call. 

Juxtapose this with my competitor who, again for simplicity, let’s say they use exactly the same number of activity steps, they only use four as well. Conversely, they start with a phone call. Their second step is they conduct a webinar with that prospective client. They then put together a trial for that prospect to use and they finish the sales process with a head office meeting. When they get the prospect to come into their head office to see the type of business, they all meet some of the team and really demonstrate their credibility as an organization.

I think if you look at the two pictures, you can see that my competitor, she has a much more powerful proposition than I do. We’re not even looking at product solutions, whatever that is we’re proposing, all we’re looking at is the activity steps we’ve used. The key takeaway of that in the sales journey plan is that different activities will carry more influence than others. A phone call by no means has as much level of influence as potentially a webinar, a trial, or a head office visit will. That’s often the message I’m sending to salespeople. It’s not necessarily about the quantity of activity steps you use, it is about that quality and the level of influence that they have.

Marylou: A question about that. When we look at the accounts themselves and the stakeholders and the accounts leveraging the type of buyer profile, does it also influence the activity? For example, I may have an influencer, like you said, that’s going to drive the conversations and drive the velocity of the pipeline and help us get to close faster with more quality at a higher conversion rate, for example. I may also have doers, or suppliers, or innovators in the audience that I want to make sure there are activities that get them excited and having that sense of urgency to move forward.

We do this in our sequences, we try to engage based on the type of buying scenario that these people are going to be influencing in the sale. They may not be influencers themselves but there may be some things that we need to incorporate in the activities to keep them engaged. When you’re thinking of activities besides influence, are you also looking at the motivation of the buyer, and what would drive them to engage with more velocity and more quality at the same time?

Simon: 100%, and that’s why I use to point out that not every sales journey plan will be the same. Certain organizations, certain buyers will be turned on or interested by different things. Not every step that you use with one buyer will have the same effect on another, and that’s why we highlight the importance of sales journey plans. It does need to be tailored to the prospective client you’re speaking to.

Where they get somewhat more complex is the example you mentioned of how complex the sales process is because then maybe multiple stakeholders in the decision-making process. If that’s the case, you may need to tailor a sales journey plan to those individuals. Then you may have a C-level sales journey plan for an opportunity but also a lower level more stakeholders who are involved and you need to tailor a sales journey plan for them but also for the C-network at the same time. It really depends on your client that you’re trying to bring on board. We work with organizations that sometimes there’s only one decision-maker in a process. That would be fantastic if that was always the case, keep it really simple. Typically, there are multiple people involved now. In that point, you need to tailor your sales journey plan to those stakeholders who are involved.

Marylou: Okay, but we could start off for those of you who are thinking ay, ay, ay! We could start off with the jump account, or the sharks, or the minnows. The way I like to look at this is let’s work backward from revenue, people. How are we getting our revenue, what types of accounts are getting us our revenue at a higher conversion rate, and that’s where we begin working on this new concepts like you’re learning today of the sales journey plan and building momentum. You’re going to walk through how to have the luxury of having clients, not all of you do and I know that, but if some of you have the luxury of having clients, you work it backward. How did we get this client? What steps did we do? What kept them engaged through the process? What kept them salivating to go to the next step with us? That becomes the baseline or the foundation for a sales journey plan, for example.

Then within that, those activities that kept them always engaged, and always wanting more, and always willing to have a conversation with you, time in the diary, time on the calendar, what were those events that led you to close one? I think if we start chunking those out and we draw them out on a piece of paper, or on our favorite digital whatever, we can then transition into this next step that Simon’s going to talk to us about which is his transitioners.

Let’s pretend, Simon, that we have now mapped out the journey. We figured out the activities that would keep this momentum. I love that analogy of the truck pull, I can totally see that, and not that I’m a truck puller but I can totally see that. Now we have that figured out, how is this then linked to transitioners?

Simon: The transitioners, as I define them, are those activity steps. If you were to look up the word transition in the dictionary, it would be defined as changing from one stage to another, whatever that be. We coined the term transitioner as actions or activity steps that help an opportunity move closer towards a sale. Whenever I’m working with salespeople, that’s what I’m asking. I’m asking what transitioner can you use to push this opportunity towards that sales close window, to put it in its optimum position to attain that sale.

You all have used transitioners in the post probably without even using terminology for them in sequencing or cadencing. Examples would be phone calls, the transitioner, a meeting, a webinar, a trial, a testimonial for having prospective clients or customers attend maybe an event or a webshop, or exhibition, all the type of things. There are multiple transitioners that you can use at one time. It’s how you manipulate them, how you use them in your sales journey plan. The key thing that I’ll reiterate on sales journey plans and utilizing transitioners is that momentum crescendo. The point I try to make on this piece is that we need to be mindful of the timing of the transitioners that we use because any transitioner, any activity that you use, its level of influence will diminish over time.

To use an example, if I had an opportunity that is 12 months away from the sale, then it would be ludicrous of me to instigate and push for a trial of my product in month one of that window. Because by the time I get to that finishing area of that 12 months cycle, that level of influence for the trial has completely diminished. That’s where the momentum crescendo is in. We want to develop ourselves journey plans to use the transitioners which helped to build the level of influence the closer that we come to that buying window. That might mean at the latter point of the sales cycle that we increase the regularity of activity steps, the transitioners, but more so that we increase that level of influence. That’s part of the key thing to also consider and take away.

A great example of this would be in politics, I always use this as a really good example often. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, whenever a party is brought into power, often what you’ll find is that early on in their term they will implement some of the more undesirable legislation. Then when it comes close to re-election time, they’ll often invoke more of the desirable governance. Things like tax reductions and type of things, they’ll often come when they’re looking for re-election. That’s because we as consumers, as members of state will remember the things that they used closer to the re-election time and we should be conscious of that in our sales process in the same token. 

The momentum crescendo influences the sale greatly so try and build our transitioners, our activity steps the closer we come to that buying window.

Marylou: To be respectful of time, I have one more question for you and that is our audience of folks for this podcast know that we are test and measurement machines. What we like to do is test a variety of different methods or in this case we may want to test a variety of different activities, one against the other, and split our list and see which one resonates and record that. Do you recommend as we’re putting these journey plans together that we do look at the ability of testing and doing an A versus a B version, or do you think it’s best to plan one scenario, run it through then talk about it, and then create another scenario based on the results of the first one?

Simon: To me, you want to find your success formula. You want to find that routine of the sales journey plan that most of the time always works. That will happen over time but what I always encourage salespeople to be mindful of is that you do need to tailor that sales journey plans with the person. You will get to a point in time where you’ll find, you know what, this process works. I’ll use this journey plan and nine times out of 10, it works. However, don’t get complacent with that. Use it but also tailor it where you need to because there will be that circumstance where you need to change something.

Once you’ve tried a few different ways, you’ll make mistakes 100%, I still make them every single day, you’ll find that success formula. You’ll find that sales journey plan that the majority of the time if I follow […]. More often than not, I’ll win that client or at least I put myself in the best position, the optimum position to win that client.

Marylou: This is so encouraging because as I say to my audience, we put our ego in our pocket, we test, we measure, and we’re looking for the optimum conversation. In this case, conversation wrapped in activity and momentum, I love the way you’re framing this up for us because I’ve never really thought of having a crescendo effect as we move further. But it makes perfect sense to do that. I’m very grateful that we had the time to talk today because I think we have some pretty good foundations here, and now this is a few better ingredients that we can add in and test and measure.

A lot of the tools we have here in the states that we use allow us to test our conversations, to test our activities, to test what you’re calling transitioners. It’s a beautiful way for us to start a plan, and actually activate the plan, and then test and measure the results of the plan. Then like we always do, we’re always iterating, we’re always improving, and this works really nicely with that.

Then and only then when we get to a plan that we’re comfortable with, we may want to look at segmenting that plan by persona, or by tier of account, or whatever segmentation that we feel is going to give us the higher yield conversion rates, the higher velocity which is to reduce the lag. And then based on the average deal size whether we have multi-stakeholders or not, we have a number of different ways to build momentum through the pipeline and get to the revenue that we’re looking for.

The book, again, everyone is Simon’s book, Simon Portwain, and it’s called Sales Icon–Selling In The Shadows. It’s available on Amazon in the US, it’s available brick and mortar, still, Barnes and Nobles, probably, throughout the country.

Simon, thank you so much for your time and I will ask you offline to give all your contact information so that I can put it on the page for the podcast. Is there a way that you would like to say now that we can get a hold of you if we have questions about the book or want additional information on the services that you offer?

Simon: Best way to get a hold of me is on LinkedIn so please reach out, feel free to connect with me, send me a message or you can email directly to me at simon@sales-icon.com happy to help anyone out there, feel free to get in touch.

Marylou: And the book is a definite must-read, guys, to put in our library because there’s a nice framework in here that would allow us to add on to our sequences and cadences. Because right now we’re a little bit spoiled and that we have tools that put the cadence together for us and put the sequence together but this is adding a twist to it, a richness to it that we want to make sure that we incorporate going forward.

Thanks again, Simon, for your time today. Very much appreciate you joining the podcast.

Simon: Thank you.

Is selling just a job, or is it a lifestyle? Is it possible that people normally seen as innovators are really just masters of sales? These are some of the topics addressed by today’s guest. Michael Hageloh is the author of the book Live from Cupertino. Michael spent 22 years working with Apple, then turned his attention to working with entrepreneurial startups. Listen to today’s episode to hear what Michael has to say about applying strategy to process, the importance of practice, and how practice applies to the concepts that Michael explains in his book. 

Episode Highlights:

• Where Michael’s work fits in along the pipeline
• Applying strategy to process
• How practice applies to the concepts in Michael’s book
• How to put together a conversation to practice the conversation
• Selling as a lifestyle
• Disruptive revolution
• Building connections that lead to relationships
• Understanding the outlier
• How goals are one part of a system

Resources:

Live from Cupertino

Transcript:

Marylou: I am so interested in hearing where do you think this thing of yours fits in the physical location in the pipeline? Where do we start with Michael’s work?

Michael: That’s a great question. I’ve been asked this on 50 different interviews so far. Each and every time, which is characteristic of me, I’m adjusting this to the audience on the other end and that’s the musician in me. You don’t go out on stage and play jazz when the crowd wanted blues. It ends up being a bad evening for the both of you.

Although I speak of pipeline and we had one and we managed it as a sales force every Friday, I in the book did not focus on those aspects. I focused on the art, the soft spoken pieces of why we were successful. You’ve got to say that in my personal selling career of the 22 years, I was only involved with one organization. I haven’t had multiple exposure. That’s why when I left, I went on a purposeful journey of one year stints. My two years at Adobe have been the second largest deal in their history. It was very different than doing hardware, doing services.

Where I fit in is clearly at, to use terms of B2B level, face-to-face, the senior level call, in my former world, the chancellor, the president of the institution, the president of the university, the provost, the deans, the mechanics of the deal are not important. The results of it are everything. When one structure something at that level in the $10 million, $20 million, $50 million, $100 million range in the series B that we closed at $60 million, when you’re in that level of number, process is not important. In fact, process gets in the way.

I spoke of the one sales training that mattered, it was an improv sales training. It wasn’t even sales, it was just a theatre company that did improv. It’s the ability to read the customer, ability to read the situation, to read the audience. This was something that Steve did masterfully and I observed and wrote in the book on how that happens. How all those pieces come together. I moved from a president of the university from to, “We’re going to do this so all across the entire campus with just a little bit of nuance pick up.”

That’s the antenna one has to have. You’re not capturing that in a customer call and God knows the phone conversations are critical, and the letter follow-up is even more critical, and the emails have to be perfect, and all those pieces of the puzzle have to be right, but you’re not getting the nuance of it, the musicianship if you will, without that face-to-face. I’m the face-to-face person. I just think that people buy from people, you know that. If you’re doing widgets, that’s a different story, but in my category and what turned us from near out of business in 1998, from the two weeks away from closing the doors, as Michael Dell said, “They should just sell the company and give the money back to the shareholders,” from that to today, is a musical journey.

Marylou: This is great because I think a lot of what we do in life, as to say where I am is strategy, but strategy applied to process.

Michael: That’s great, one should have that. You can’t do what I describe without that, because then you’re just shooting in the wind. You have to have it. I think today’s data-driven world even more so. Having great musicians who know how to play, putting them in a row doesn’t turn out to be orchestra. It’s having the conductor,  it’s having the right piece, it’s having the expertise, it’s having that drive and giving that drive to your players such that they’re going to give you that one little bit more, and perhaps where magic is.

Sony had all the pieces of the iPod long before Apple, all the pieces, every one of them, including the music catalog BMI, but they couldn’t put it together. They had no orchestration. They had no conductor. They have plenty of systems that probably knew all of it, but they couldn’t put it together. That art, that putting it together, that essence of Apple is what’s in the book.

Marylou: Michael, you’re a musician. Obviously, I’m a musician. A lot of growing up.

Michael: Well, I’m semi-retired, but just because it’s weird to be my age and be on stage still.

Marylou: Yeah, but once a musician, always a musician.

Michael: I’m much older, so it’s even odder.

Marylou: What we’re taught early on is practice; strategic, focused, practice. How does that concept apply to the concept in your book and also some people I recall growing up being a person who was accepted to Juilliard at an early age, and I remember watching some of the workshops where they practiced one area of music over and over again. What applies to the sales conversation here in mastering that, and understanding the nuances, and working that muscle so that you can recognize when there’s a shift? How does one practice that? How do you equate that in the book?

Michael: Chapter one is rehearsal. Guess what? Practice. What’s the old joke, how to get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice?

Marylou: Yes.

Michael: I’ve actually been asked that many times when I lived in New York. In that case, I did give them the proper directions depending on where they were. They still look lost. We are actually friendly, we just don’t have time to chat with people, just understand that, because of I missed this train, I got to wait 20 minutes from a subway platform. It’s unpleasant. Let’s move on. For rehearsal and practice, one thing that I’m going to say that might blow people’s minds is the fact that at Apple, you need to know your products inside and out.

If you were at a sales conference, and our then VP in his sales talk at the end of the conference walked up to you and said, “Michael, tell me about X.” It better be smooth and well put together. Not a repeat, and here’s an important part, as a fellow musician, you I think will appreciate this. It isn’t that you pick up a piece of Beethoven and you play it, it’s that you pick up a piece and you play it as you. There’s a nuance.

We aren’t rote memory repeating machine. We are humans that add our own zest to everything we say. At least we should, if we’re salespeople. Rehearsal gets you the basics, and the tools, and the fundamentals. Practice gets you the opportunity to put those together in a message. A really great practice lets you adapt that message to the audience. That’s the cycle.

Marylou: But you’re presented in many cases when you’re starting out with the music, the notes, how to play the notes, how much emphasis to put on the notes, what notes to play. If you’re in a company that doesn’t have that level of structure, how does one go about even starting to put together the conversation to practice the conversation?

Michael: You do as the person who converted from technical to sales like I did. You do this I think through careful observation of the great. You got to be around them. This is a little problematic in our gig economy where you’re answering calls at home via some system that’s delivering them to you, and you’re never around others. You’re not in that call center anymore, because now all the calls are going to your own home or cellular device. You’re answering your work call while you’re 75 miles an hour down the interstate.

That they don’t have a solution for, because I still think that the get togethers, the jam sessions are quite important, particularly for salespeople. I did it through observation. I don’t know that I have a formula for that, but I did it through careful observation of others. Good, bad, I would go on every call I could with the two reps that I was supporting and just relentlessly listening. From that, one thing about great salespeople that I’ve met is that they know themselves. They know that, “Hey, I’m not good at this,” or “I am good at that,” and I quickly figured out I needed to understand my own self in this context, not in the music context. I knew I can play this, I don’t want to play that, but I had to understand it in the business context when I transitioned to the business world, and only through observation and asking.

When we did reviews I said, “I don’t want to see the standard line written in my review. Tell me what I’m doing wrong. Spend time on that. Work with me on how I get better. Don’t placate me. Tell me what’s wrong,” and watching others, and then I am a voracious, always have been researcher. I was fortunate to be in higher education. I was in the university marketplace. I was surrounded by people with lots of letters behind their names. I can tell you that I knew emotional intelligence before it was even cool. I knew it by my own customer.

One thing I’ve found in this, I do it to this day, I always start by, “I know what I know, tell me what you know?” and this has opened up enlightenment for me. “Have I adopted all of those ideas, theories, theorems, practice, and practicum? No,” but I keep them. I think it’s critical especially field people to keep a broad knowledge base. Well it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got to, again back to music, if you’re a percussionist, you don’t have to be able to go through an entire Beethoven Sonata perfectly, but you have to have enough to know that you can stay communicative with it.

I can tell you when I played a concert, my most feared instrument is the triangle. I’m scared to death of the triangle and people go, “Why?” I say, “You know why? I only get one chance.” There’s no follow up on the triangle folks, no follow up. There’s no second note. In that situation, that is pressure to the max. A sale situation for $100 million deals aren’t that tough, because you’re interacting. You can take a breather, and have a coffee, and sit down, and build up a different relationship, and ask about the kids, and be interested. I know what I know, I want to know what you know.

This is what I saw from greatness. This is how I developed it and this is how then you take rehearsal. You take rehearsal into performance. I 100% believe that the only way to great selling is through practice, practice, practice. Again, it’s not getting up there with a rote memory reading spec sheet. Good grief, if I ever read a spec sheet, I would shoot myself probably. If you’re doing product number or product ID and price, you will be replaced. That’s not selling. That’s just fulfilling.

The 10 chapters. All of them are distinctive in their mechanics, but together, they are the melody. They are the magic if you will. I said that. I think I told you at the beginning, I had two failed manuscripts. It was very difficult to get the essence out and just like it’s difficult to get the essence out of great music, but once you get there, you’ll know.

Marylou: I think what you said is so encouraging to my audience of listeners in the sense that, there are a lot of former technical/engineering/nontraditional sales executive persons listening to this podcast, and we all are a little intimidated by the charismatic outlier who just sways into the conversation.

Michael: Yeah. I was a support engineer for one of those. I know exactly what you mean. Everybody loves Ray, and then my other one was the technical pipe. The nuts and bolts, knew everything, he could give you a 25-pair color count if you want and don’t ask, I can’t. Many people listening are probably going, “What’s he talking about?” it’ll be you and I, it’ll be our secret, they’ll never know.

Marylou: Yeah. It’s our thing.

Michael: They will never know. They probably don’t even know that word analog yet. They’re still thinking that that’s bad TV or something.

Marylou: Yeah and our 1A2 equipment like, “What? What’s that?”

Michael: Oh my gosh. Oh wow. At any moment, when I see blinking lights on my phone, I have to plug it in. We’re not going to rotary dial here are we? Are we? Are we going to rotary?

Marylou: Maybe.

Michael: Are we going to rotary?

Marylou: We could be.

Michael: I think at some point, someone’s listening to this and they’re going to tune in right, “Are we going to rotary?” and they go, “Oh, different podcast.”

Marylou: “Wrong podcast. This can’t be Marylou’s podcast, oh no.”

Michael: The funny thing about the charismatic one, at least one of my early ones was, was he deep in a product or no? But what did he have? He did have that ability to get the appointment, because everybody loved him. He genuinely loved others. He wasn’t a, “Can I put you in this card tonight?” he’s the one and I wrote about him in the book, that I would go into his hotel room when we’re on the road and get, “Hey Ray, let’s get going,” and he’d have a CD player set up with little speakers. I was like, “What are you doing?” He says, “I always listen to music before a presentation. I want to get into the zone.” I’m like, I’m a musician. I’m thinking, “Okay, whatever. I’m hoping that I get paid tonight as a musician.” I never understood it until later to going, “What was he doing? He’s relaxing his mind. Why?” from a mindfulness professor I talked with, because that’s actually proven that synapses will reconfigure, and you will get deeper and better new thoughts when your mind is relaxed.

That’s why I wrote a blog post that’s been quite well picked up where I said, I get my best ideas in the shower and here’s why, because I’m relaxed. When you couple him with the super technical which I had, Craig. Craig was a wild one. The guy knew everything. To your audience, if you can become that amalgam of both, you don’t have to be super cool charisma, but you have to have a little personality in today’s day and age. People are all looking for interaction. They don’t get it. If you give them some respectful interaction, you’d be surprised. Also know what you’re talking about, you’ll go far.

That’s kind of where we were as a sales culture, the 30 years or so of us in higher education. Remember, my customers taught everyone else’s customers, because mine were professors and people in higher education. Those are who my customers were. The other thing is they never left their jobs. They were there for a life. Bending the truth wasn’t something that worked out. I remember playing on stage, if you’re just playing covers and you’re not into what you’re doing, it shows.

That lounge lizard kind of, no disrespect to lounge lizard musicians, but there’s no life there. There is a reason that a guy in a green plaid leisure suit and a piano has nobody listening to him or her.

Marylou: Right, like you say in the book, you’ve got to feel it in your bones and in your gut.

Michael: You do.

Marylou: It’s buried in there somewhere, yes.

Michael: People slide that. They, “Okay, I really feel it. I’m doing this for a job.” True selling is not just a job, it’s a lifestyle.

Marylou: What you said in […] too, about you’ve got to love your client, love your prospect totally, just like your dog or cat loves you, that’s how you have to be with your clients and your prospects, each and every one of them.

Michael: You are so right and whether you are connecting with them on the phone or connecting with them in person, if you really do know what you know, but want to know what they know, if you really are engaged and that’s more than just sending a card on their birthday. That’s great and there’s nothing wrong with that and I’m a fundraiser today in a higher education institute and we do those kind of things, but people know that I am truly interested in what they have, too. I’ve had many it in my former life sales calls where we never talked about the product, never.

We talked about problems and solutions and ways and the product, I make this statement in the book and I’ve had a lot of controversy over it, a lot of push back. My statement is simple, Steve Jobs was not an innovator, at all. People are like, “What is he talking about?”

Marylou: “What? How can you say that?”

Michael: I said, “Steve was a master salesman.” He took you to a new place that you didn’t even know you want to go. When you got there, conveniently his products were there.

Marylou: Right and that he did steal the Apple. I worked at Xerox, on the Star Systems, which is the precursor to the Apple.

Michael: Oh my God, park. Oh my God. Now, I understood, we just got a mouse from you guys.

Marylou: Oh, no, no. You stole all the GUI. I worked on that in the early 80s. He was the master.

Michael: Oh my gosh, I was not involved. I joined in 89.

Marylou: Okay, I forgive you.

Michael: We were still well under our way by that but, it’s funny you bring this up, because in a lot of ways, disruptive evolution, disruptive revolution is often times led by time and place. You think of companies like Uber,  I’ve lived quite a while in New York City, I know the taxi system is the problem. Let’s face it, what Uber ended up being or is, whether whatever marketing stand, is they’re still a very effective taxi system that uses a wonderful platform that wasn’t around 20 years ago.

USB. Everybody knows what USB is, Universal Serial Bus, everybody knows it. Apple for one got it from Intel and said, “We’re going to popularize this because nobody’s making peripherals for things called the Mac anymore and we’re going to be out of business, so let’s universalize the entire interface so that everybody can make stuff universal.” Now, the rest is history.

I don’t know that time and place of park and that time and place in the valley and the time and place that was what it was, but I think that at least from my perspective, the company did a really good job. At least the latter part of the company, not from the initial part of popularizing and putting words and understanding around, “Why do I need a graphical user interface? What will that do for me?” Here’s why you want to carry 2000 songs in your pocket. Here’s why you want to carry a full computer in your pocket that have 2000 songs in a web interface and we’ll call it, I don’t know, an iPhone.

That part of the orchestration chapter, that part of bringing everything together in a really great harmony, music, melody. You and I could use technical terms, the audience might not get it, but that is when you walk out of where you are listening to something and go, “Wow, I feel it in my bones.”

That right there is the mystique of Apple. We were able to make you feel it. When you can get your customers to do that. That doesn’t mean like, I won’t mention any other CEOs who currently are running around wearing black turtlenecks and think they’re the next Steve. Look guys, you’re never going to be that. Be who you are. Don’t worry about being him. Don’t worry about being a college drop out. Be who you are, which I always think is fun, because the black turtleneck thing, who was the, Theranos, what was she? I forget her name offhand. She was going to be the female Steve. Unfortunately, the product she was selling didn’t do what it said it was going to be.

You know what? We were okay and I said it many times to customers, “Hey, go buy something else. I’m not right for you.” And they’d look at you and go, “What? Are you kidding me? You’re supposed to convince me to buy this.” “No, because you’re going to go away and go, ‘Look what he did to me,’ and I’m not doing that.”

Marylou: It’s not a good fit that we teach that a lot to be able to walk away or if you have the relationships perhaps suggest another alternative that better fit their needs. That they can go and explore on their own time, but we’re really about providing a quality experience and beyond extraordinary experience for the people with whom we think we have a good fit.

Michael: See, and you said the word that in your description, I get it, how deep that means to you, relationship. Now, a lot of people gloss right over, “Oh, we have a relationship management system,” like I don’t know many systems that manage relationships, they manage data and then from that we can generate relationships.

Marylou: Yeah.

Michael: There’s the key there, you have a relationship or should foster a relationship, no matter how you connect with the customer. Especially in today’s somewhat capricious world. Relationships seem to be very disposable and they’re not. The human kind is built on them. When I’d sit down and move somebody from a PC to a Mac, it usually takes an hour or so. When you saw them, the light went on, when they got it. When they start understanding. When they started self-direction, started really producing their own.

That human connection, I have today customers that were as I told some the other day, associate professors, who are now provost of the second largest universities in the state. Today, I walked by the office and they say, “Come in and talk to me about whatever’s cool, Michael.” and last time I saw this individual, before I left Apple he said, “You know I bought an iPod for my wife. She’s learning Spanish off of it and I bought an iPod for myself and I’m not still learning,” and I looked at him and said, “You know, it may not be the iPod’s fault.”

Of course, he could throw me out of the office quickly at that point in time, but we have a strong relationship and was he an entry in the CRM? Absolutely. Were there call notes? Absolutely. Were there details? Absolutely. You can’t not do that. That is the foundation for the mechanics for building that real relationship. That’s an important part. I actually have quite a bit about CRM in the book. Because it was painful for a lot of “shoot from the hip” reps, who didn’t want structure. What they were really saying is, they didn’t want you to see what they were doing.

Marylou: Yeah or they, “You leave me alone. I bring my numbers in. This is how I do it. I can’t be replicated in any way shape or form, so don’t even try.” That’s the outlier, if you will, but I am a big proponent of understanding from a structural point of view, what the outlier does and then from that creating a rhythm around it and then building it into the soul of the actual reps that don’t necessarily feel they have that type of flow rhythm in their body and learning.

Michael: It’s brilliant. It’s exactly what I say. For instance, I’d say in the book, I’d say, “I’m not a big believer in goals,” and they’re like, “What?” “I’m a believer in systems, because goals are part of systems,” and that’s exactly what you just described. Get those superstars and build that systemically, so that your next superstar, who might not be a superstar at the moment, can be birthed. That next musician who needed just a little bit more work can go, “Wow,” and you see what they did or where they went with that.

It’s just different terminology, but I’ve always been a proponent of individual goals, do X, do Y, do Z. Those goals, once they’re achieved, now what? What do I do with them? What I want are systems, where goals are component of.

Marylou: Exactly, and right now in this day and age, we have the tools to be able to record people, to get them on video with our phone, to record their audio, to transcribe the audio right on our phone. All of these tools to get better and to improve and to feel more confident are at our fingertips now. So why not spend the time to do this with all of our people and get them up to the point where they’re all confident, comfortable, and can perform at their best, really.

Michael: Right, that’s the modern day following with the great reps around. It was my only option. It’s great resources. This is the part of back to rehearsal, this is the part of making yourself a better player, if you will. Making yourself better musician. Making yourself do the impromptu, because I can tell you how many times things turned.

If you’re in front of somebody, you’re sitting across from them and we’re on a do-this-do-that, do-this-do-that and don’t have any sense of the moment, then things can go awry very quickly. It’s like the car buying experience at times. I mean they seem to be very systemic. No disrespect to folks who work in the car industry. I’m just a consumer. I’m on the other side of it.

It seems that when you take them a little off, at least the junior ones, the very young ones, take them off track a little with something that’s not in the call list, they’re, “Huh? What do you mean?” It’s so frustrating. It seems to be one of the last things that technology hasn’t touched, but I guess they’re trying with order direct from the factory and those kind of things. Off the rack here, sorry.

Marylou: No that’s okay. I do want to be respectful of our audience time and mention the book. The book’s name is Live from Cupertino: How Apple Used Words, Music, and Performance to Build the World’s Best Sales Machine. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us today. The book is available on Amazon Now, correct?

Michael: It is, anywhere you buy books.

Marylou: Okay, anywhere you buy books. There you go. I very much appreciate you taking the time to educate us. This is such a great topic and one that’s very timely because of the way things are in life right now, we are craving relationships. We have the ability to do things at scale, but every once in awhile you want to take it down a notch and build those important relationships. It may not be scalable, may be scalable depending on where you are and what you sell, but at the heart of all this in the heart beat is really loving the person or the other, I say belly-to-belly at the other side of the table from you and understanding where they’re coming from, too, to become a better salesperson.

Michael: You’re 100% right and to your book, it becomes predictable, if you do those kinds of things you’d be surprised. We are fairly predictable animals and as somebody who started life looking for applause, you get where you really want to please and when you get to that point, the magic happens. Hey, it’s been fun. It’s been fun, what do you play, just quickly. What do you play?

Marylou: I play the oboe and I also play piano.

Michael: Okay, so you only need one oboe and a band, just so you know.

Marylou: I know, yeah. I have a piano at my house and my kids kind of dabble and my brother is a bass guitarist. He was at the 11th hour, 59th minute of getting into Gwen Stefani’s band.

Michael: Oh wow.

Marylou: Yeah, 8–10 years ago. It was the high and the low of his life, all within the span of five hours or something like that.

Michael: Well, fortunately, I don’t talk about the highs and lows and thank God, they weren’t any pictures back in the late 70s. We’ll just leave it at that.

Marylou: There you have it. Michael, again, thank you so much. Take care.

Michael: Enjoy, bye.