The way that we utilize data can make all of the difference when it comes to sales. It’s more important to make quality connections and have meaningful conversations with prospects than to contact a large quantity of prospects on a superficial level. Utilizing data in the right way can help you make those quality connections.

Today’s guest is Matt Amundson, the VP of marketing for EverString. Listen to today’s episode to learn more about what EverString does and what Matt has to say about how data can be used to help prospectors learn more about their prospects and make conversations more meaningful.

Episode Highlights:

• What EverString does
• How EverString’s processes work
• How companies that engage with EverString have their data together
• How EverString handles different parts of the pipeline
• Whether EverString improves forecasting
• Why a meeting may not turn into an opportunity
• Using technology as an aid rather than a replacement

Resources:

Matt Amundson

EverString

Email Matt at: matt@everstring.com

Marylou: Hi everybody! It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Matt Amundson. I knew I was going to mess that up but Amundson just like Anderson. He’s the VP of marketing for a company called EverString. The reason I have asked Matt to come on the show today was because I was very intrigued by what they’re doing over there—over at EverString in terms of the list.

Now, you guys all know that I harp on the list. I don’t like the fact that we’re still blitzing, still mass mailing people, emailing, in the hopes of finding the cherries, the low-hanging fruit. We have to change this. I’m going to let Matt take the stage away and talk all about it but really, what’s happening here folks is that we are trying to reach the era of quality and stop worrying about the quantity of things because it’s not helping us. Our response rates are going down, our delivery rates are going down, we’re getting a lot of people who are savvy to these mass mailers. So really, it’s about us thinking, “Who are these people who we can do business with, who want to do business with us, and what can we find out about them?” so that initial conversation is more meaningful and resonates with them.

Matt, I would like you take it away from here. Tell us about what you guys are doing there and how this is impacting our industry for the better. It’s not replacing the development people, the sales development folks, it’s augmenting them and making us appear smarter, more concerned, and better salespeople because we can focus on the conversation finally.

Matt: Well, thank you for that awesome introduction, Marylou. It is an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be on your show. I was a huge fan and literal disciple of your book that you put out with Aaron Ross, Unpredictable Revenue. I read Predictable Prospecting and loved it, so this is an absolute treat for me today.

Marylou: Oh, wonderful.

Matt: Just kind of the nutshell here on EverString. EverString, we consider ourselves a modern data platform. The term modern gets thrown a lot and I’ll sort of unpack what that means to the team here. Modern in the way that we collect and curate data, and modern in the types of data that we deliver. When I say modern in the way that we select and curate data, a lot of legacy data providers use very traditional means of collecting data. They use call centers—whether domestic or offshore—to essentially call on businesses and try to figure out the firmographic or technographic data on those companies and they bring it into their database. The unfortunate thing about that is when they don’t connect with that company, that data just stays stagnant, it doesn’t get updated. What a lot of people see from the list from these legacy data providers is just really outdated data.

The way EverString approaches it is we blend human beings with machine learning, so we’re actually able to have some human interaction with some companies we collect data. But then also, we use a machine to say, “Okay, this person collected data in this way, I can go do this out of scale.” Then we feed that data back to a person for verification. What we get is really up-to-date data that’s then curated by human being which is a much smarter and more scalable way of collecting data. It’s allowed us to catch up with a lot of the legacy data vendors in terms of the coverage of data that we’re able to provide our customers.

When I say modern from the perspective of new types of data, because we […] data science and machine learning into the data, we’re able to figure out connections that are just between businesses. What that enables an SPR or salesperson to view is to see things like, “Oh, this prospect or this account looks a lot like these three customers that we have.” Or, “This company looks a lot like these companies that are growing so it has a high-propensity to buy or perhaps it has a high-propensity to need a round of funding.” Or for some of our financial services customers, “This company may be a high-risk for credit or low-risk for credit.” We’re able to not just look at data in the form of fields inside a Salesforce record but how do we pull that all together and use machines to help us extract the insights that we probably normally could get as a person but on a massive scale.

Marylou: To what extent does the company who engages with your company have to have their data act together or could we have the typical dirty database that made an effort to put the fields together and not have duplicates but it’s not the way we want. Is it okay if our data is not pristine to run through an engine like yours to come out with quality? Or do we need to come in with quality as well?

Matt: I’m so glad you asked that question. That’s something that comes up a lot. It really doesn’t matter how clean or dirty your database is. All we really need to have an understanding of is, are the account that exist in your database, are they at an opportunity level, are they at a deal level, are they at a customer level, etc. We don’t ingest any of the firmographic data or whether you have multiples of an account or of a contact. It’s our database. We’re bringing our own fresh clean of data to you. It’s less of a pull and more of a push. The only thing that we’re pulling out is which ones are customers and which ones are still just a prospect to you.

Marylou: Okay. We need to know relative position in the pipeline which may be difficult for some people to even give you that but…

Matt: It can be.

Marylou: …yeah. We could do the best we can at all—is it all the pipeline? Because top-of-funnel especially in a Salesforce instance, we don’t necessarily have the stages defined, we have to sort of […] fit it to get that coworking qualifying stage. But definitely from opportunity down, there has been a lot of emphasis about keeping track of where things are, relative position, how long they’ve been there. Do you also take in that time parameter to help understand the slow medium and long time to sales conversion rates and things or do you get some gist of days and stage is what I’m asking you? Is there some level of us being able to provide that or do you glean that out so that we know our tiers of accounts and how long things take to actually close?

Matt: Yeah, great question. Some of our most advanced customers are using EverString to build models around fastest wins. If they’re feeling confident about their data, about when an opportunity was created up until when an opportunity was closed one, then we can certainly ingest that data and build models about that looks somewhat like that. When I say model, what I mean by that is, if you had say, 10, 15, 20, 100 accounts where you had an understanding that, “Hey, this is quality. I want to see more just like this.” We can take that, understand all the components that make that account a good fit and go look for similarities.

Marylou: Oh, interesting. Because a lot of times we have to fake it ‘til we make it and just start with what we think is a good baseline and then go out—I guess, bottom-up would be the best way to describe it—and then dispute it or rejoice in it, one or the other. Because we think we’re on the right track but then we start actually doing these campaigns and these touches and seeing how long things take, with mindfulness now instead of willy-nilly, we still maybe off with that. But at least it gives us a good starting point of, “Do we have tiers, first of all, of accounts? Do they close with different conversation rates? Can we have a nice and ebb and flow type of forecast that’s not pigs and valleys because we fed it with enough of these different accounts that had these different cycles and yields, so that our forecast looks really good.” Have you seen that with the way that your company works, by feeding us better data to have better conversations, that our forecasts are now looking a lot better and a lot more impactful and actually meaningful?

Matt: Well, there’s two things that I would say with that. EverString is not necessarily a platform that you would use to say, “Hey, what’s the quality of this opportunity? How likely is it to close?” But there are two things that I found over the course of my career that are the primary blockers to why meetings don’t turn into opportunities. A lot of it has to do with the relationship that exist between sales development and sales or marketing and sales which is sort of however you want to carve up those three groups.

Marylou: Right.

Matt: One is that the company is not a good fit. I always give the broadest possible explanation for why a company is not a good fit. Say you are Marketo in 2012. In those days Marketo could only sell to companies that were running Salesforce as their CRM. If your SPR brings an AE, a leads from an account that’s running from say Microsoft Dynamics or SugarCRM as their CRM, that’s going to be not a fit. Right?

Marylou: Right.

Matt: The second thing that causes a meeting not to turn into an opportunity is the element of timing. It might be the right business but the timing maybe off. There’s two ways that we save those two issues off. One, we create models to give you a concept of fit. “How much does this look like one of your existing customers?” and that includes hard filters like it has to have Salesforce CRM or maybe it has to be using Google Analytics etc., or it maybe it has to be of a certain size or number of employees.

And then the second thing is we […] intent saying that, “Hey, this company is actually doing active research for this specific product or service.” And so, as an SPR, when you’re able to bring an AE, an account that looks exactly like 10, 12, 15 of your customers and is actually looking for a solution or a service like what you sell right now, the conversion rate from meeting to opportunity just shoots through the roof. While we may not be necessarily be impacting speed in opportunity to close through some sort of AI that’s telling you, “Hey, this is good.” Or, “You should be doing other things.” The quality of the opportunities that are coming into the latter stage of your funnel should be significantly higher because you’re only dealing with accounts that are a great fit with your business and are actively looking for a solution like yours.

Marylou: Right. I would think that psychologically, that also has an impact on how we engage in our conversation…

Matt: Absolutely.

Marylou: …right or wrong, if we know or think we know that they want to talk to us–it’s that whole thing that are like inbound versus outbound. When people are coming into us, coming into our net, we have this sense of, “Well, they want to talk to me.” Whereas when you’re going outreach call, they feel like you’re bothering them. I would imagine this really helps not only with the velocity but helps with the way that we actually engage in that conversation because we feel better about it, because we think we know that they’re looking; they’re actively researching, the timing is right. The hand-off like you were talking about before still remains a monumental problem out there in the world, but I know you guys can help us with that. But getting the information in the hands of the reps in a timely fashion is really where this all just opens up for a higher converting sales pipeline, I would imagine.

Matt: Absolutely. It becomes, and I’m glad you touched on psychological part if it, because for sales reps, when they hear that, “Hey, this is a great fit business and they’re actually looking for solutions,” It starts to become a little bit of a race between them and their competitor, “Hey, if I don’t extract the dollars form this prospect, somebody else will.”

Marylou: Somebody will.

Matt: That really changes the way they feel about meetings and about the opportunities and it applies a little bit of pressure on them. They want to convert those because they see an opportunity that make money but they’re also like, “Okay, I’m in for it because there’s probably two or three other vendors that are going to be involved in the cycle.”

Marylou: Right. But like you said, in Predictable Revenue, we talked a lot about the mapping call which is navigating through the organization in the hopes to start assembling the right people. While it’s fun, it’s time-consuming task but what you’re doing is you’re advancing that sales conversation to the point where the points of differentiation have to be really honed by the teams. The ability to have a persuasive sales argument really starts to show.

What this is doing, what I think is great about this whole AI deep learning, it’s forcing us to be better in the sales conversation, focusing on our sales skills instead of running around admin trying to figure out, “Well, where are these people?” You know where they are, you’ve got them, they’re interested and now it’s up to you Mister and Misses salesperson in order to be able to convince them that you’re the right fit. My colleague Keenan just wrote a book called Gap Selling, really finding that gap of what they have today, what they can experience, and why you’re different from the competition. If we can focus more on that we’re going to get better at it just by nature of the fact that we’re having more conversations. Awesome.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. This is the one thing that as a marketer, I’m very much a proponent of how we up-level the sales game and how do we get away from just the, “Oh hey, you’re a marketer and you need this.” And more into, “Hey, I have an understanding of what’s going on in your business. I understand the challenges that you’re going through.” and then tailoring their offering towards that. If you’re a salesperson, you’re going to talk to me that way, I’m so much more likely to buy from you.

Marylou: Exactly. What we’re trying to get to which is that consummate professional who is there as a guide to help them weave through all this crazy information to get to the end of where they want to go. Like, “Where do you want to go? Where do you see yourself?” They now need to prove that we’re the ones that can take you along that success path from where you are today to where you can ultimately be. I’d love that.

The other thing I’m hearing too, Matt, is perhaps not only sales skills but mindset and habit and repetition and discipline—all the things that make it difficult for us because we multitask so much, this focuses us in on that human interaction, building the empathy, more of a human-to-human interface results with the help of technology. Do you agree with that? Do you think technology is more of an aid rather than a replacement in this case?

Matt: I absolutely do. There’s the philosophy that we’re really locked into here at EverString—and one shared by one of my personal mentors, Kyle Porter the CEO of SalesLoft—and that is, “This is meant to be an Ironman suit and not a Terminator.” What that means is, this is meant to take a salesperson and make them better; enhance the things that they’re great at as opposed to replacing them with a sentient AI being. This is, “Hey, you are an amazing salesperson and I want to take that to the next level.”

Marylou: Definitely. Getting to this next step, I’m sure people are sitting here—probably driving home right now—but I’m sure they’re thinking, “How does one get started? Is it as simple as going through your historical information, kind of mapping through who are my client types and giving enough information so that we can model?” or is it like, “Here’s what I’ve, go figure it out since there’s a lot of data in the data set that you could probably piece together.” How do you usually set this up? Is it part human telling you the story as well as the data or can you do this figuring out the initial architecture from the data itself?

Matt: Yeah, good question. It’s really both because the thing is, there’s always some sort of tribal knowledge or inherent bias that is just within a business around the types of businesses that they want to sell to. Sure, we could probably just extract the data. We could probably then separate that into all their various ITPs, build an entire total address of markets for them, there’s only hard filters that are sort of hard to glean just from raw data itself. A lot of that has to with what we talked about earlier in the call that internal data climb limits isn’t always there or the factors that make something good versus bad can’t be captured inside CRM.

I’ll give you a real-world example. When I was leading the SPR team at Marketo about seven years ago, we realized that one super consistent pattern with all of the meetings that we booked and it was, “Does this company have a one- or a two-color logo?” It sounds ridiculous…

Marylou: Wow.

Matt: …but if a company had a two-color logo, they were like, I can’t remember the exact statistics for doing like a hundred times more likely to buy from us than a company that had a one-color logo. It makes sense because at the time we were sort of disrupting the world of just batch and blast email service providers and we were selling to much more sophisticated marketers than people who are just like, “Hey you know, I’m going to load a list in and I’m going to send an email to my entire database.”

Companies like that tend to just spend a little bit more money on brand and those brands had always, when you work with a branding agency, they would bring you back a two-color logo as opposed to just the one. Now, that could have been tins and shades, right? It could have been like blacks, whites, and grays, but it was true over and over again. I don’t know if it just became a self-fulfilling prophecy where SPRs in our business, we’re like, “Oh, one-color logo, I’m not passing that to a sales rep.” But it was shocking how true it was.

These are the types of things that are the tribal knowledge or the anecdotal evidence that creates a sales bias. Those are the things that we need to know about however crazy they might seem because shockingly enough when I talk to our data scientist here, they’re like, “Oh well, we could pull if a company has two colors in their logo or not.” I’m always surprised by what our capabilities are. But those are the things where it’s not just, “Hey, let’s look at a group of customers,” and we’ll find all the patterns that exist and recommend that, “Hey, if you like these 10 here’s the next 100 to go after.” But there has to be some sort of hard filters that go into place like I talked about earlier.

Marylou: This brings you back to the days when we used to direct mail where we looked at heuristic, we looked at psychographics information, demographics, you name it. We overlaid as much as possible with the idea of segmentation. Getting down to that dataset that was the smallest dataset with the highest quality was the goal because it cost money to mail. We couldn’t really mass mail although a lot of people did. We did as much as we could to try to fine tune that.

The other thing I like about this is bias in itself is a kind of an interesting parameter and metric because it could also dispel what the C-suite thing is the right account. If we go into the database and the heuristics and the characteristics of this particular best-case scenario for closed one, looks slightly different with them than with the C-suite had in mind. It’s an interesting topic to discuss. What made you think that?

You and I had probably sat in so many meetings where the goals for the next year are net new logos with no understanding of what it took to get the logos we had, what sources caused those logos to close, and like you said, which are the different conversion rates, it was just some number arbitrarily pulled out of a hat, “We need 15 new logos per rep this year.” I like the fact that the data can utilize bias, but it could also challenge it so that you’d have good conversation going in before you make your final, “Okay, this is what we want to start with. This is the dataset that we want to pick. Here’s what we’re going to go with it. We’re going to run these campaigns against it to validate whether that was a good selection and if not, we have the ability to pivot then because it’s so enriched with a lot of different data points like that.”

Matt: Yeah. The other thing too is I think, a helpful advice to any marketer that’s thinking about bringing in anything whether it’s a new data source or whether it’s a new piece of martech stack, is if that purchase is going to interact with the sales team in any way, shape or form, they need to at least play some part in the purchase or the enablement process. Because I think as marketers, just because the martech stacks have become so big we’re constantly bringing something in and adding it and then it just kind of shows up in front of a sales person whether it’s in the form of an email or an alert or an object that lives inside a Salesforce. For them to feel comfortable with it and to feel like they are a part of that process, they have to be engaged.

If you just show up one day and say, “Here’s a number…” and this number is on a scale of 1-100 and then it says, “This company is an 80. This company is a 60.” They’re going to be like, “Well, actually I think that 60 is an 80. I think this 80 is a 30.” They need to be involved. If they feel comfortable with those numbers that are coming through, then they’re going to engage with it so much more and the process starts to flow a lot better.

Again, getting into the psychology of it, if you feel you have some ownership of it you want it to work. If you feel like it’s just some new thing that’s been pushed into your CRM and you now have to “deal” with it, then you mentally start to self-sabotage a little bit and say, “Yeah, you said this was good. Well, it turns it out it was terrible.” If that starts to spread in the sales team then no one’s going to want to use it.

Marylou: Hence the compliance issues we’re already experiencing with a lot of the technology stack that’s being put into the CRM or are bolted onto the CRMs is that there hasn’t been a buy-in from the people who are going to use it. That’s the age of software service or just software in general usages. The end users are not involved in either the design process, implementation process or how they’re going to set it up to execute it. Chances are, you’re going to be fighting a battle when this thing deploys which is not it was intended to do but that’s what happens.

Matt, how do we get a hold of you going forward if we want to explore this? What is this called now? Is this data science? Is there a term for what you guys are doing? Have you invented any term yet for this?

Matt: Well, you know the thing about our space is we’re sort of borne out of this idea of predictive analytics or predictive marketing. We realized that a lot of what you are talking about beginning of the call, hey, if we’re just injecting people data and trying to build models off it, more people will have massive data hygiene issues, and for the models that you build aren’t very good. About three years ago, we had to pivot into being really a data platform first that applied data science. The category that we’re leaning into as a business is a modern data platform. Getting out of the age of software that we’ve talked about at the opening of this podcast and into something that not just data but also insight; not just present day but gives you the potential future state of the business. Modern data platform is what we’re called.

If you want to learn more about it, you can swing by eversting.com. I’m also a person who loves chatting with peers or people who are making their first transition into management or are interested in this type of stuff, so you can follow me on Twitter, I’m at mattya66. You can email me directly at EverString, I’m matt@everstring.com. I’m probably in ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg and every other database, so my email is there and that’s what it is or feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I love interacting with people and answering any questions that they have. I’m no a salesperson so we can just have a grownup conversation whenever you’d like.

Marylou: Yeah, this is really the way to ebb the future, I think. I’m really excited about the blend of the science, but also the human side, and also how we search on the internet, how we utilize data, download data on the internet. I think at the culmination of all of that allows us to reach that ultimate goal that we’ve been trying to reach which is to be in a situation where we’re actually in sales conversations a lot more of the day than we are doing administrative work or looking for stuff or researching stuff. This allows us to really fine tune our craft which is what we are hired for which is to create outcomes more predictably so that our revenues spike. I’m all for it. I think it’s the greatest thing ever.

Matt, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today. I’ll make sure that all of these links to get a hold of you are in your little page on the website…

Matt: Aww, thank you.

Marylou: …so that people could reach out. Really love what you’re doing and wish you a very happy holiday as well. We’re at the end of the year 2018 doing this broadcast.

Matt: And you as well. It was a real pleasure to be on. This looks like a milestone for me, so I’m just giddy over here.

Marylou: Well, thank you very much.

Content creators know that video is a powerful tool for delivering a message, and that means that it can also be a powerful tool in the world of sales. Learning how to use video effectively can be a helpful skill in all parts of the funnel.

Today’s guest is Daniel Crouch, Enterprise Account Executive at Videolicious. In today’s episode, Daniel will talk about using video, not just at the top of the funnel, but also after you get your foot in the door. Listen to the episode to hear what Daniel has to say about how and why he started using video, how to use videos for pre- and post-meeting contacts, and how to get started learning to use video effectively in your own sales process.

Episode Highlights:

• Daniel’s background in sales
• How Daniel got started using video in prospecting
• How Daniel uses pre-meeting videos
• How Daniel’s videos are structured
• Avoiding excess words and keeping videos short
• Using a script or teleprompter to stay on point
• How to write copy to use as a video script
• Post-meeting videos
• The main purpose of using video for closing
• Getting started learning how to use video

Resources:

Daniel Crouch

Videolicious

Transcript:

Marylou: Hi, everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. We’re going to pivot for this call. Everyone knows me as the person who is responsible for helping you guys get in the door. Start conversations with people we don’t know and take them to a qualified opportunity.

Today’s guest, we are going to do exactly the opposite. I have today, Daniel Crouch. He’s an account executive Videolicious. I met him through, I guess, LinkedIn. But he was at an event that I was at, University of Texas, in Dallas. Is that where we met Daniel?

Daniel: Yes.

Marylou: Yes. And I was so intrigued by his use of video that I’ve asked him to come on the podcast. As we started talking, though, we just cited, this is not the topic for prospecting. What we’re going to talk about today with Daniel is what happens after we get in the door. Now, I’ve had a lot of people write to me, and asked me to put together interviews with people for cross-sell/upsell. Now, this may be an offshoot of that. But this is going to be all about today, what do you do after you get in the door, and how video makes an impact to increase loyalty, lifetime value, all those really important parameters and checkboxes, we want to make sure that we get to with clients that our revenue our market share, our product share growth is off the charts.

Well, we have the expert in video today to talk to us about what we can do to get started after we’ve gotten in the door. Daniel, welcome to the podcast.

Daniel: Hey, thank you very much for having me. And by the way, I know we can absolutely talk about what happens after you get in the door. But I’m more than happy to share how people prospect with this thing, too. So, we can absolutely do both, I’ll leave where you take me.

Marylou: Yes, Daniel is an expert in the entire funnel. But I thought today, since this is an area where I kind of go, you know, a little gray is after we get in the door, I love this idea of pre-meetings, post-meetings, closing, all these places, Daniel, you are selling us that we can use video in all these places, correct?

Daniel: Yes. Just a little bit of background on me, I’ve been in sales for about a decade. I have always been in SAS sales, worked it all-size companies and I have sold to all size-companies. I kind of feel like I’ve seen, probably not everything, but I’ve seen a lot of it in those areas.

Marylou: The good, the bad, the ugly, right?

Daniel: Yeah, so my previous company before I came to work for this video company that I work for now, Videolicious was SAP. It was a tool that we started using there. Initially, the way that we all thought, you know, when they said, “Hey, guys, when they got a lot of tools, but here’s another one, here’s, here’s this video tool.” The world is extremely noisy, that’s going to help us stand out in inboxes, right? We’ll send videos to people instead of just text that’s way more exciting. We thought, that will help us get into doors that we’ve been not able to get into. And it did, doors that I had been knocking on for years, finally started opening to me.

So we absolutely started using it for prospecting. I guess, it just kind of gradually occurred to me and my team, and I guess the rest of the company, “Oh, wow, wait a minute, like after you’re in the door, that’s when the real magic starts to happen.” That’s when you can really start to leverage video. Because when you’re prospecting, a lot of times, it’s you know, yeah, I think SalesLoft just came out with some stats of, it’s actually just a couple of weeks ago, if it was even that long, you know, videos or emails that have videos in them, increase your replies by 26%, and it does that. But once you do get in the door, and you are connecting with the people who said, “Yes, I will meet with you,” your videos always get watched at that point.

You know, it’s not a it’s not an “if” it’s just a matter of “when.” And so, we found very common ways to use it all throughout the cycle. There were really, four core ways that I use it, one was prospecting, that’s obvious. Obviously, we want to talk about this after that. The second is pre-meeting videos. The third is post-meeting videos and the fourth is closing.

Now, I send all types of videos all the time. It’s like my Swiss Army knife for selling. It’s the most impactful tool that I have ever used in my 10 years. So I wanted to come work for a video company. But that’s kind of where – those are the broad categories where all the types of videos fit in: prospecting, pre-meeting, post-meeting, and closing. So I don’t know if you want to just take those one by one, Marylou, or…

Marylou: You’re driving the train here, Daniel.

Daniel: Okay. That’s dangerous.

Marylou: I promise to keep us on the rails, how’s that.

Daniel: Yes, please stop me when you need to. I’ll just start with pre-meeting video. So one of the things I in my most recent position at SAP is I was in AE, and we had a team of SDRs that were calling for us and we have since changed this strategy. But we had this strategy where we were essentially, I mean we were just, our SDR team is just the way that they set it up, and the tools that they were using, but they were just bludgeoning our prospects to death.

I had this little territory and we were always calling into it. We kind of got to a point where, people were accepting meetings, because it will – yes, we’ll take this meeting with you, if you will leave us the hell alone. It was kind of the sense that we got on a lot of our calls. We would see meetings, I mean, that team kept meetings on my calendar. But for the most part, you know, they’d show up, I would show up to the meeting, and a lot of times, there were no shows, a lot of times when you did get on the phone, they were like, “What do you want?”

Not a really good way to start a relationship. And anyway, so they were a little antagonistic. And a lot of times, I can’t tell you how many calls we had to reschedule if they got rescheduled. And so we thought—okay, well, we have this video tool, why don’t we try sending a video. A meeting shows up on the calendar and I’m going to record a video of myself saying, “Hey, I’m Daniel, I’m the guy who wants to talk to you, I’m the guy you’re going to be talking to, I’m really excited to talk to you, here are all the things that we’re going to talk about. I can’t wait to talk to you tomorrow.”

The first thing that that did was, it didn’t completely eliminate no shows. But it really reduced and I don’t know the exact percentage, but it really reduced the number know shows that we started to have. Not only that, when people did show up to the calls, they were way more focused, because you’d given an agenda, they were also way friendlier, because, when you’re sending that pre-meeting video, you’re happy. They look at it, and they’re like, “Oh, that’s a person, not an email.” The tone of them was completely different. And like I said, it reduced the no show.

That was one way that we used it to help convert more of our leads, and actually get more leads into, a working opportunity status. It just set where we could have been setting, getting off on the wrong foot, it helped to get us set on the right foot.

Marylou: How long was this pre-meeting video on average, did you end up honing it to?

Daniel: Well, in general, if you’re doing video, just a general tip, 30 to 90 seconds is about all you’ve got. If you’re a movie producer, with all the things that they have to keep people’s attention, you got longer than that. But when you’re a sales guy, and you’re just talking to a camera on your phone, or your computer, you’ve got 30 seconds to 90 seconds. I will answer your question.

What I have found is that, a prospecting video, you know, the 30 to 60 seconds is kind of the sweet spot there. There are other types of videos that you can go a little longer and people kind of give you a little more time just based on the type of video it is. But for those, they were super short, they were max 30 seconds.

Hey, I’m Daniel – I can’t wait to talk to you, is the general rule or the general flow. So yeah, that about 30 seconds.

Marylou: Okay, giving them the gist of – it’s almost, in the olden days, when I was selling into large companies, we would actually physically send an agenda, here’s what we’d like to talk about. And we agreed on our last call that this is a topic that was of interest to you, and here are the bullet items of what we want to cover, looking forward to seeing you.

So essentially, you put this into a person, a face, and your emotion, your excitement, and also giving them a heads up. It is like, “Hey, this is what we’re going to try to cover tomorrow.” I think that’s great.

Daniel: Yeah, it’s exactly the same thing and a lot of the things that I’ll talk about, people probably do a version of this already, either with email or something like that. But what we found with video is, they get more attention, they connect with people a lot more, you get to your intention behind it, your emotion behind it that would really resonate with people. They also get shared, and we can talk about that now or later. But that’s a huge, that’s a huge component of how to use video strategically, is to know that people kind of default to sharing these things. So yeah, I sent this to, George, who’s going to be in this meeting. But then he forwards that, to Jane, and, you know, all of a sudden, you’re pitching to Jane as well. With a lot of those other types of, I guess other ways, to introduce people to meetings, or get them ready for meetings, they just get ignored a lot of the times.

Like, great, there’s an agenda – you know, I’ve actually got an email that I’ve saved of a CMO that I met with recently. Her exact quote was, “Wow, that was super cool.” A video overview and agenda. That’s the first for me. Nice, (smiley).”Some I didn’t know, but they were like, “Wow, that was really neat.”

Marylou: Yeah, wonderful. I like that idea and I think that since you’re not having, you know, everyone’s like – Oh, yeah, I got a recorded videos but what you’re saying here is it’s strategically used for meaningful events or meaningful conversations, and you ask them within the video to share it with the other people of the that are attending the meeting, or do they naturally want to do that?

Daniel: It happens naturally, a lot. If you really want your champion to help, like there a certain type of video that I sent for closing or to help me close deals, it’s just a summary of everything that we talked about, you know, and the value that we’re going to have very specifically for that company. A lot of times my champion at that point, I kind of coach them, like, you might want to share this with the decision team, right? Because you’re going to put into words in the most compelling way possible. Well, you’re going to record the right message, the words that you want them to say, as they continue this journey, internally, you have an opportunity to say it exactly how it should be said exactly what should be said. A lot of times, your champions, get really excited when you send them videos that help them get deals done internally, because that’s usually a big challenge. They’re excited, but they’re not that great at selling.

Marylou: Right. Well, let me share at this point with the audience that the first time I tried to do a video like this, it was for a pre-meeting video, I think I must have recorded it 45 times before I liked what I was saying. The benefit and the beauty of going through that angst was my conversations on the phone improved, because I practiced so hard and so long on what to say. And I did it in 15 seconds, 15 to 30 somewhere in that range. But are you finding that when you get started that you want to put your best face forward in this case. And so, you practice a lot more, which ultimately benefits you in your sales conversation, because you practiced the conversation a lot more?

Daniel: Oh, yeah. I actually didn’t realize how powerful that was until my very first sale cycle at Videolicious. When I was talking to a VP of sales. And it really occurred to me like, when I have to sit down and record a video, knowing the types of attention spans that people have, like, you don’t have time to beat around the bush, you don’t have time to use excess words, you have to get to the point.

Like the bell rung in her head, “Oh, this is going to make my reps better.” I mean, it really does, it forces you to know what the heck you’re saying, and to get to the point and to put value first because if you don’t, you’ve lost people. And yeah, I really started to learn our stuff better. My point is better, my talk tracks better when I was developing videos. And to your point of view, taking 45 takes – everybody is like that at first.

What I found – two things happen when you start using video – number one, even for people who are super like reticent to do it and I’m into it now. But at first, I mean, everybody’s a little self conscious. But in every video you record after that first one, you get a little more comfortable and your video gets a little bit better you learn a little something after that video, after that first video in every video that makes you more comfortable or makes your videos better– you just have to do it.

One thing I don’t think a lot of people think about a lot is, this isn’t just a new tool, it’s really a new skill you’re learning and it takes practice just have to practice it but it is worth it. It’s definitely worth it.

Marylou: Definitely. I had a class certification class just this past fall and we had one of the students who decided, she was going to use video and went off and recorded, I think, 30 unique videos to invite people to a workshop. She said her first one, it was horrific. She thought she was great in person because that’s how she usually sells and she was but what was happening was she was saying, “uh, uh-mm, and so,” there was a lot of inflection of words as she was thinking about her thoughts and that was coming across in the video. She told me that after she got through that first maybe four or five, the rest went really well and to your point, she had tremendous attendance at her conference that she invited these people to. So, I’ve seen – the more you put into it, the more you can get out of it, but it’s also – maybe there’s a honeymoon period, I don’t know, but the response rates are incredible for video.

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, they really are and until a couple of weeks ago, it was a kind of a fluffy number but SalesLoft did analysis of thousands and thousands of emails and said, hey the ones that have video in it they get 26% more replies. Maybe they’re all “No’s” but probably not, but a “No” is valuable sometimes.

Marylou: A “No” is very valuable in our world because it does the math for the funnel, a top of funnel includes “No’s.”

Daniel: Yup, it does. I’ll go chase somebody else if you’re not the one.

Marylou: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: One of the things that helps a lot and I did not believe in this at first but, one of the things that helps a lot with the “uh-mms,” and being on point and taking or doing 40 however many it takes, is learning to use a script or some kind of teleprompter. You can get these on your phone where you can reveal, it comes baked in with Videolicious This isn’t a Videolicious thing though. But you can find you can find stuff on apps that have teleprompters there are – I’m sure other solutions have a teleprompter type features but I wasn’t a big believer in that at first until I realized how much time it was taking me when I was trying to go off the cuff – what I’ve learned about scripts and teleprompters and things like that is that’s another thing that you get more much better at, the more you do it.

I didn’t like them before because I was really bad. It sounded like I was reading and it wasn’t good. But as you keep doing it, you realize that’s the way to eliminate all that time that you’re wasting and produce a really good video. You just have to get good at figuring out how to emote as you read.

Marylou: Do you have on your website for Videolicious, some of these tips of how to write a persuasive argument that is eventually going to be a video conversation or are we going back to basics with persuasive type copywriting and all the books that are out there about how to write a persuasive piece of copy that entices your person to want to lean in and say, Oh, my gosh, I’m so glad I’m reading this. I’m so glad I’m listening to this video.

Daniel: Yeah, well, as far as what’s on our website, honestly, I’m not sure. I mean, that’s one of the things that that we take extremely seriously—is training people how to, again, it’s not just a tool, it’s skill, like, you can probably figure out how to use the tool. What we do is we have media experts, we have people who have taught, people who are in media now, how to be in media as people on our staff.

So anyway, that’s one of the things that we do a lot of training on, is how do you –everything from what should be behind you, right? How should you talk to, how should you sell? How do you how do you persuasively talk about this.

Marylou: That’s wonderful. Yeah, I know, with the phone usage that we teach, we write scripts out because if you think of an actor, they’re reading from a script, but when the movie finally comes out, they’ve memorized it to the point where they’ve had their own inflection, they’ve had their own joy, or emotion to it. The same thing happens with the telephone usage. If we start with the script, we have all of our talking points that are in there, eventually, it’s going to become more natural to us. But it’s good to start with something solid, so you’re not bungling your way through a conversation.

Daniel: Yeah, with video, I found two things that help. One is, when you’re thinking of persuasively like, how am I going to put this video together, because reality is, you do have just this, this tool, and there are a million ways to use it. So just general principles are more helpful. You know, anytime you can tell a story, whether that’s customer story, or telling your story about your company, putting what you’re saying into a story form is so much more powerful than just a list of facts. So that’s one that’s persuasive way to go about it. One way that keeps people interested is to have a story for them to follow along to.

Another is, I don’t know another way to say it, other than to just speak in bullet points. So a lot of times my videos are – Hey, George, this is Daniel, I’m going to talk about three things. Number one, what’s the main point, number two, number three, something about that helps people go along with you. It especially helps when you’re trying to break up a big message. So I almost never write long emails anymore. If an email gets to a third paragraph or even a second paragraph. A lot of times now, I’ll turn that into a video. But usually, throughout that process, I figured out a way to bucket it in such a way that I can say, number one, number two, number three, that that’s something that’s been really helpful as well

Marylou: Wonderful. Let’s talk about post-meetings. You mentioned pre-meetings, we have now a good understanding of where to use video there. What is the purpose of a post-meeting video?

Daniel: Yeah, well, again, you may have some version of this that you do with email or something now, where you’re – hey, it was great to talk to you, here’s what we talked about, here are the next steps, it is essentially putting that type of thing into a video form. And again, the reason I started doing video instead of that is because, again, those things by and large, get kind of ignored – They’re like, great, yeah, I know what we talked about.

When you can put a video together, and this is again, where you get kind of strategic about it, where you’re saying – Yeah, here’s what we talked about, but you’re peppering things in there that are really designed to help move this thing forward faster. And something that I’m always trying to do is either get more decision makers involved like the other people. Yes, I had this call with this guy who said, he’d take a call with us, that was great. He’s excited but how do I get that guy to get all the other people I need on the phone. And ultimately, the decision maker, right, the guy who’s going to sign the paper that’s where I realized that these post-meeting videos could be powerful. Because again, the simple idea of putting the words together so they don’t have to, the fact these kind of inherently get shared, you get decision makers involved faster.

One of the first times I ever did this led to the largest opportunity that I ever worked while I was at SAP and it got—I in the video I kept alluding to, I knew key to getting that deal done was getting the certain people involved as early as possible. So in the video, I kept referring to the President, the President, the President, the President, and then I kind of coached my champion to shell that issue, to share this video with other people before I sent it to him. And lo and behold, second meeting, the President was in the room of the entire company. Like I said, it led to the biggest opportunity we ever worked there. That’s a simple concept but that’s pretty much the gist of the post-meeting video. And there are other types of post-meeting videos that you can send, but in general, just recapping a conversation is one. The others kind of get into that category of, or at least the category I put them into of closing videos. The post-meeting is pretty simple, just kind of recapping things, helping move things along, get decision makers involved.

Marylou: What about setting the next event the next meeting the next calendar date? Is that done in those videos? Or do you still go back to the old fashioned way of – once you’re in a meeting getting that next meeting setup and on the calendar? Or do you actually use a video for that as well?

Daniel: Well, I guess it depends. I mean, I guess there every now and then you get off the calls where you couldn’t get that meeting scheduled, and then you can allude to, okay, now we need to, you know, when you’re recording a video, it’s important to not go overboard with the information. So if the most important thing is for you to get across, we need to put this on the calendar meeting, then that needs to be part of that needs to be most of your message. But in general, no, I’m closing for a meeting on the meeting.

Marylou: On the meeting, that’s good. I was just curious to see if that also prompts people like, as a reminder – Hey, remember, we’re supposed to meet up to the first of the year, I wanted to get some dates on the calendar. If there are people that you want me to include in the meeting, this would be a great time to get back to me so we can get this organized. I would use a video for that just kind of regroup people, especially if it’s somehow got into this sort of, maybe land of indecision, or if they went away and did something, or something happened that they had to cancel, I try to bring them all back into the fold by using a video for that.

Daniel: Yeah, that’s super smart.

Marylou: So let’s go on to closing and then I want to make sure that we’re respectful of the time because a lot of times people are driving around listening to this. But closing, I’m really curious when you would use it there. Is it the same thing to remind people of the importance of getting this done? Is it to continue to sell? What is the main purpose of the video for closing?

Daniel: Yeah, so there comes a point in most sales cycles, where you’ve kind of done all the steps, right. They’ve seen the demo, they’ve had their conversations, you’re kind of at that decision point. And so a lot of times, that’s where deals stall or they slow down, and they’ll close when you want to. One of the ways, I have three, and I guess this is especially relevant for this time of year. So I’ll mentioned three that I use pretty consistently. But one I use in every single deal, when you get to that point where you as a rep fully understand the value that your thing is going to bring to this company. Summarizing, it is essentially sending a video that says – Hey, everybody, its Daniel. Here’s a summary of what we talked about. These are your goals, these are your challenges, here’s how we’re going to impact those things.

The way I kind of think about putting this video together is if this got shared with the CEO of the company, and this was the only thing he ever saw, this minute and a half video to the end of that and say, why aren’t we already doing this, right? That’s kind of – you’ve taken everything you’ve learned about that company and the impact that you can have, and you put that together for your champions. That’s the one they typically get really excited about and they share.

I know the first one I put together. When I was at Videolicious, the guy said, I just forwarded this to my VP. That that video is powerful. I think it’s the most powerful way you can use video because you at the end…

Marylou: I got that, yeah.

Daniel: You’re putting into words and emotions, and intention—you’re essentially giving the words that you hope your champion will say, and you get to deliver that message, right? And it gets delivered to everybody. And it’s the right message every single time. You only have to do it once. So anyway, yeah, that’s when I use all the time.

Marylou: I think what I love—what you said about that is you’re thinking about the call to action should be in this case, why are we not doing this? I love that working backwards from the desired result of your video, to preparing whatever it is whatever sales argument or persuasive argument you want to put together to get them to say that. I mean, we do that at top of funnel all the time. We start with, is this a waste of our time? You know, internally, we’re asking ourselves that, and then we ask, Is this a good team to work with? Should we continue to move and advance it together through this process to see if we’re a good fit or not? And then finally, we ask ourselves, should we work together? Is this compelling enough solution that you’re ready to put resources against it?

So each stage in our top of funnel ask that kind of question so we can design videos to prompt them to naturally ask those questions. I love that. That’s wonderful.

Daniel: I mean, I found your kind of answering three questions. Why change? Why now? and Why us? If you can put that in one video, that’s gold.

I will say one, prospecting tidbit, in as much as you can research a company and put this together on your own beforehand and put that in front of the people that you’re chasing, that you will see a huge uptick in, you know, people getting back to you and setting meetings. Instead of putting that together at the end of the deal, you put it together and as much as possible, saying, hey, George, this is Daniel, I have researched your company to death. Here’s what I know about what’s going on. We probably think we can help you, let’s talk.

Marylou: Yeah, I love that. I love that. So we’ve learned a lot about ways to use video. What do you suggest we do now that we’ve peaks of interest of some of the audience wanting to work on doing this? It’s the perfect time of year, we’re talking together now, in 2018 nearing the holiday season, time that we reflect, we try to close our last deals, but we’re also reflecting on what we’re going to change for next year. How do you suggest we go about learning the ways we can utilize video to help us with our selling?

Daniel: Call me. I think that you just have to start doing it. Actually, before we started using video with SAP, I actually had started doing some stuff on my own with video. You don’t have to, I mean, yes, absolutely. We’d love to talk to anybody who wants to talk about video. But you know, if you’re a rep and you’re at your company, and you guys haven’t invested in a tool like that yet, pick up your phone, record a video put it on YouTube, share that link with people, share your private URL with people and just get started.

Again, it’s a skill, it’s not going away. That’s one of the reasons I was super interested in this I can’t imagine a future where this isn’t the norm of how we communicate in the next couple years. You need to get good at it now. So start practicing.

Marylou: It is, it’s a skill, it’s worth practicing and it helps the other skills in your toolbox for selling. It helps you be better on the phone. It helps you write emails that are short and sweet more persuasive in nature, billboard signs, like to call them, getting to the point and respecting that people are busy. It can’t help not help everywhere that you are in that sales process when you’re speaking the sales conversation.

Daniel: Yeah, I think ultimately, right now, video stands out a little more than it will in the future. At some point, we’re all going to be doing it and you know, the skill is going to matter a lot more at that point.

Marylou: I was going to say we’re all going to be doing it. But how many already blocked those LinkedIn videos that are out there. It’s like another, oh another video.

Yes, doing it well, is very important. So where do we find you, Daniel? In order to have conversations after this – after our conversation today on this podcast? Where else can we meet you and get to know you better?

Daniel: I’m on LinkedIn. If I have to put you on one place, that would be it. I think my LinkedIn is DanielW.Crouch. Just find me on LinkedIn search for Daniel Crouch, Videolicious, that should find me.

Marylou: Okay, and then the site is Videolicious.com, correct?

Daniel: Yes.

Marylou: If you want to learn more about the offerings for this company. And again, video is here to stay, video is going to be very useful for us as we go forward. And as Daniel points out, it’s really focusing on your skill. It’s not the medium per se, it’s going to be helpful, and right now it’s in this luxury stage where the response rates are off the charts, but it will help you going forward to hone your craft, fine tune your sales conversation, talk in a way that’s persuasive yet compelling, as Daniel mentioned before, and bubble up that sense of urgency so that your pipelines are full with good leads and good quality clients that you can close at a higher conversion rate, which is what it’s all about, right?

Daniel: I believe so.

Marylou: Very good. Well, thank you so much, Daniel, for being a guest today. And I will put all this information on how they can reach you on your page. And we wish you the very best success in 2019 and beyond with video, and I’ll have you back probably the end of the year, next year to talk about what’s new in the video side of the world.

Daniel: Awesome. Sounds fun. Thank you for having me.

If you work the top of the funnel, it’s easy to believe that you don’t need to build a deep rapport with your prospects. Once you get your foot in the door, your job is to hand them off to another representative, so building more than a superficial relationship may seem unnecessary. However, today’s guest believes that sales is all about the human connection, no matter where you are in the sales process.

David Fisher is a coach, speaker, and the author of a number of books. In today’s episode, David is discussing his book called Hyper-Connected Selling: Winning More Business by Leveraging Digital Influence and Creating Human Connection. Listen to the conversation to hear about why David believes that human connection matters at all parts of the funnel, how to build rapport in just a minute or two, and why face-to-face communication matters so much.

Episode Highlights:

• Whether the human connection is necessary at all stages of the pipeline
• Why the human connection matters even at the top of the funnel
• How you can build rapport in just one or two minutes
• How you can build on your own natural traits
• The importance of face-to-face communication
• How to get started practicing the concepts in David’s book

Resources:

David Fisher’s Predictable Prospecting Landing Page

Hyper-Connected Selling

David on LinkedIn

David on Twitter

Transcript:

Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is a bit of an anomaly, I think but so, so important. David Fisher is here today. He is an author of eight books on sales and all things sales, sales skills, poly sales mindset, sales process. He’s a speaker, he’s an author, he’s a coach.

Today, we’re going to talk about the human connection and what that means. Now, most of the listeners for this podcast are top-of-funnel. Meaning we’re beginning conversations, we’re trying to get our foot in the door, we may build a little bit of rapport, but we hand them off to a quota carrying rep, or you may be a person that does all roles, and you have to build a relationship. One of my faux pas, David, is that I thought, really when we’re top-of-funnel, we don’t have to necessarily build these relationships, we can get enough to get by, but it’s like duty dating. We try to date as many people as we can to get someone really interested in us, and then we immediately pass them off to someone who actually is going to get engaged and get married. But from what I’m hearing from you, that may not be the case. I would love for you to talk about, first of all, your new book and also talk about this whole human connection. And is it used, needed, necessary at all stages in the pipeline, or are there areas where it makes more sense?

David: Well, thank you for giving me a question to start out that we could talk about 19 hours. That’ll be fun to unpack. I think the very short answer is yes, no matter what part of the sales process, you are engaged in. The ability to connect with your prospect with your potential customer, as a human has gone from a nice-to-have to a need-to-have. And I really think that it stems from a lot of the changes we’re seeing in technology and in the world that we’re living in right now which is very different. You mentioned my latest book, Hyper Connected Selling, which is really looking at this landscape where we have to manage both a digital presence and an offline presence. We have to be able to connect on a digital level, but also as a human; as an empathetic person.

I really think that because technology has enabled our buyers, our prospects to have more information than ever before, and at the same time, have more demands on their attention than ever before. Even if you’re a top-of-funnel person, even if you’re doing that first initial outreach, you have to be able to connect on a human level with that person because if not, they’re not going to give you any attention, they’re not going to give you that time. That’s why I think that no matter what your role is in that sales cycle, spending a little time to think about, “Wait, how do I connect with people? How do I build an empathetic relationship? How do I build that rapport?” Yeah, you might not become best friends with somebody, but you have to in, I feel a minute or two, build that old school know, like, and trust with your prospect. I think that in the past, we could get away with maybe not being as good at that. But in the next 5, 10 years, if you don’t have those skills, you’re going not only you’re not going to be successful, I think you’re going to be without a job.

Marylou: My first question regarding that, I have a ton of questions, but one that sprang immediately to mind is, we talked about technology, our reliance here in the States on email is just crazy dependence. It’s like a codependent thing going on right now.

David: You need a 12-set program.

Marylou: For email, you said, yes. But you mentioned one to two minutes. One to two minutes, is that one to two minutes on the phone? Is it one to two minutes in an email? Any type of touch? What do you do in one to two minutes that could build rapport?

David: I think there’s two parts to that answer. One is, I think when we look at engaging with a prospect, we have to look at it more than just a single touch point. I know that something that that you work on the idea of us being able to just call somebody out of the blue, and not only get their time and attention, which is hard enough as we know, but also then to create a meaningful connection, and then get them to take action. I mean, that’s hard. We do have to put into place processes around, sales cadence, for example, and having email touches and phone touches, and social media comes in, and social selling, I think, is important to make sure you’re having a presence on a lot of these digital platforms.

But then I do think when you actually, let’s say, get that conversation with someone, yeah, it only takes one or two minutes for us to decide. I think it actually takes less than that for us to decide if we actually like a person and we want to continue the conversation. You used the dating analogy before, if you’ve ever seen or know someone who’s experienced speed dating, I actually tried that once, way back in the day before I was married. And what was really interesting is you can actually decide pretty quickly, “Do I want to spend more time with this person?” in a minute or two. And that being said, I think that there’s some skills required to be successful in that. And maybe my point is, I think we need to start putting focus and attention on our sales teams and helping them develop these skills. Or if you’re a producer out, doing the work every day, making sure you’re improving your skills. Again, if you just have a routine job, I can replace that with technology. But I can’t replace that human empathy with a with a bot.

Marylou: Right. The technology helps us with our workflow, it keeps us consistent, it is the cure-all for things, so they don’t fall through the cracks because you think top-of-funnel again, we’re working with a lot of records, we think of our speeding plates on our fingers, on our toes, on our heads, those are all segmented, sequences that we’re trying to figure out, “Okay, where are we in our touch sequence?” we’ve got a lot of juggling to do at top-of-funnel. We can rely on technology to help us with the touch counts and making sure we’re keeping in touch. What we can’t have it do for us is to create that human connection. What we do we get the ability to speak with somebody or we do have a reply to an email or a social touch.

In your books, are there just certain human traits that we can focus on? Because for me personally, I am super curious. My kids get so embarrassed at me when we’re in the airport because I love to go up to people and like, “What do you do? What kind of work you’re doing?” I’m so very curious. Are traits like that? Are there certain behavioral traits that if I’m sitting here thinking, “How can I do this?” Or, “What should I rely on about me?” Are there certain inherent traits that we have that tend to open up the doors a little bit better for top-of-funnel? Or get them to trust us to go that next step if we’re middle-of-funnel? Does the book talk about of things like that, of how we can take our already existing, already have born, inherited traits, and expand on those?

David: Yeah, absolutely. Your curiosity has definitely been a boon I’m sure throughout your career. I do talk about the power of curiosity. Actually, I think you can learn curiosity or at least learn the process of curiosity. I talk about it too like how the next question. It’s got a TM after that, so you know it’s important, right?

Marylou: Of course.

David: It was actually something I learned more on the networking relationship building side that I’ve transitioned over to sales. It works really well. The idea of being curious, but we have a human habit when we ask a question, somebody gives us an answer, we tend to respond with the declarative sentence. If I say, “Where did you go to school?” You go, “I went to school XYZ.” I go, “Oh, I went to school ABC.” and then it stops. We don’t have the […].

Marylou: Right.

David: In that very natural, very normal thing, whereas one thing it teaches us the idea of, “Okay, when you get an answer to the question, ask the next question based on that response.” It takes a little bit of practice to be able to do that. But if you say, “Oh, you went to school ABC. What do you major in? Oh, you’re biology? Why did you choose that?” It could be as simple as, “When did you move to the area here?” Oh, five years ago? Where did you move from?” It’s actually something great for parties if you don’t know people because you make friends really quick.

I go back to the old Dale Carnegie quote, “You can make more friends in two months being interested in other people than you can in two years getting people interested in you.” I think the idea of curiosity, that really stems from this idea of empathy. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot right now. But what empathy really is the ability for us to look at another person and in our minds, we are able to understand what they might be thinking or feeling based on their facial expressions, based on their tone of voice, based on language they use. It’s such a way human have big brains because we don’t have huge brains to figure out how to build rocket ships. We have that because we had to build to develop social cohesion because it helped save us from predators, it helped us get food. That’s thousands, thousands, thousands of years of developing those skills.

One of the things I think successful salespeople need to be able to do these days is go, “How am I face-to-face interaction skills with a human being?” You talk about the fact that we’re addicted to email. Email has it’s point in the sales process but in the end, we have to communicate face-to-face with other people. Because again, facial expressions, tone of voice, language that we use, expressions—all these things have really important communication impacts. If we can’t pick up on them, we’re going to miss out.

We all had a prospect say one thing to us and we know that they actually mean something completely different. We don’t know what but something in their voice. They said that they have to wait for next quarter, but they’re not totally buying into what they’re telling us. We don’t even know how we know that, but our brains can figure that out. Leveraging that can be really huge.

The other thing that I’ve talked a lot about is the idea of creativity because I think that salespeople are, at their core, creative. We don’t talk about that a lot, but we make things, we make something exist that never was. An ideal, an opportunity—something that wasn’t there, we make it. But creativity is a skill that can be practices and it can be learned. It’s really just about making a connection between two previously unconnected ideas. If you can actually go to your prospects and customers and make these connections for them and go, “Hey, you might not have thought that, you need to talk with our company because of XYZ problem but actually, we can solve that problem for you.” Let me give you a great case example of how that happened with another one of our customers and making that connection for them. I think curiosity, empathy, creativity, three things that haven’t been talked about in the last few decades in sales are becoming increasingly important.

Marylou: The term that’s driving me crazy is add value. It’s like everyone says, “Add value.” “So, what?” would be my response. It’s like, “What do you mean by that?” Is value empathy? Is value creativity? Or is value trying to persuade somebody to notice a gap between where they are now and where they should be with your product?

David: I totally agree with you. Value is like love or success. Let’s define the term. What I think value is in this world where our prospects and buyers have all the information they need, if you really think about it, they don’t need you to give them any information. They could go and find it if they want to which is very different. Twenty years ago, sales people were the bringers of knowledge and information. We have the statistics, we had all the specs. They don’t need us anymore. They can get that with a quick Google search. Where I think we bring value now is actually helping our prospects parse through all of that information and actually make a better decision. Because the research show that the more information somebody has to make a decision, the more likely they’re going to get a bad outcome from their decision.

They’ve done this for example with stock investing. That they’ve done […] where people have more information about the stocks actually make less money; they get lower returns. The human brain just—we can’t process that much information. If you as a seller can go in there with your creativity, with your empathy, which builds trust which allows them to then listen to what you’re going to tell them and then share your creativity with them and go, “Hey, here are some possible solutions.” As you said, fill in that gap, that’s really where I think the value comes in. It’s basically helping them make the decision faster, helping them make it with less cost, or actually just helping them make a decision and not getting stuck. One of the biggest objections ever is, “We’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing.”

Marylou: Right. Overwhelm, I think in this day and age, is just horrific. If you go look online, yes, you can find bazillion things about whatever it is you’re looking for. But then you start building your own internal list like I do. My own internal matrix—my little comparative matrix—starts getting built inside my head, and then all of a sudden, I realize I have like 10 columns by 100 rows. It’s like, “How can you make a decision based on that?”

David: That’s exactly right. I use a B2C analogy that most of us have experience with to show this. If I’m buying a house, there’s a lot of complexity to it, you don’t do it often in your life, there’s some pretty big cost associated with it. Obviously, not only […] but also the time and energy. If you’re going to get it wrong, you’re going to be unhappy. A good real estate agent is not giving you a listing of all the house, they’re actually helping you figure out exactly what you want, and the best way of getting it, and making that process smooth.

You, as a seller, have to do the same thing. Whether that’s managing all the different people involved in the sales process, all the different decision-makers, whether it’s saying, “Hey, here’s all the information. Let me show you the three things that you should be looking at. Hey, have you asked this question about implementation? Is there going to be a learning curve?” Your CFO is just going to say, “Hey, what you have is fine for now. We’ll just do that for another two years.” Here’s how to respond back to that CFO. That management of the process I really think is where salespeople provide value.

Marylou: Definitely. Even though we do have the ability to find stuff, not everybody has the time to do thorough research. Even though yes, everything is out there for us, a lot of my clients have said to me, “Thank you so much for finding me. Thank you so much for contacting me. This is an initiative that we have to do but this is overwhelming the amount of information that we have to know about, and we don’t have the resources for it. We just can’t do it.”

David: Right, that’s value. You’ve helped them move forward in a way that they couldn’t do without you. I think that you have to do that more and more.

Marylou: Yeah, definitely. Are these three categories or area, if I wanted to get started really owning this, learning it, practicing it, is there a process—since I’m a process expert—is there a process that I would go about? Could I start some relative position in the pipeline? Are there certain spots where it works best, or do I focus on this next question, TM-type of thing where I’m actually getting something thrown at me and trying to practice answering with another question?

David: It does depend a little bit about where you are in your role? I think the idea of using something like the next question, […] everybody can do that, everybody can use that tool. Again, it works in your professional, it works in your personal life. I think the other place to really look at this is, again that idea of empathy, is looking at not only your sales cadence, but looking at how often am I talking to somebody either by phone or video or in person? And really focusing on practicing your skills in those environments.

I think for a lot of people, it also helps to get an honest opinion or at least an honest-ish opinion; usually from a colleague, a friend, not your friend and not your significant other because those two people actually won’t tell you the truth for different reasons, and saying, “Hey, I want to get better at building trust and building relationship with people quickly. What are two or three things that you noticed I’m really good at and what are two or three things that you think I could get better at as far as having a human conversation?” It can be challenging with these “soft skills” because we all inherently have them in some level, we just don’t think about them. The biggest thing is just bringing some awareness and some intention into it and then moving forward from there.

Marylou: I think for us, top-of-funnel, this will be a beautiful place for the map people. They call them the mapping call which we’re still doing today. I just worked on a project where we defined 32 marketing profiles within one organization and they were classic persona. It’s like, “Okay great, marketing, but where is that person?” The mapping call allows us to question various people who are in and around the bullseye of our desired guy in the middle, then we have people who directly influence him the next level out, and then the third level out from that or indirect. The indirect people, the warm referrals, I think would be perfect for practicing this type of roleplay of the next question because you’re talking to human sat various levels who may not know why you’re calling, but you get to understand how to implement this with a variety of different calls. If you do block time, now we’re talking 46-60 phone calls that you’re going to initiate, that you’re going to practice.

In our world, for those of you who do this type of business development, you’re doing this everyday so you’re going to get really good, really fast. Then you can start working and marching down the pipeline and adding the technique as you move further into the pipeline. I think that would be great for top-of-funnel folks to work on this in a roleplay environment.

David: I love it. One thing I would say too—I don’t know if this is a process thing or as much as a reminder—is that don’t be afraid of those human conversations when they come up. You don’t have to become best friends with somebody. We were sharing earlier about the idea of you talking to a prospect who had a listing about breweries and you enjoy breweries, you’re like, “Hey, tell me all about this beer you have.” I think sometimes we’re afraid of having that conversation or asking that question. Throughout my career I found out that if you can make that connection, the business becomes much, much easier. Just having that reminder, “Hey, I don’t have to run away from that. I can connect person-to-person…” and that actually again, makes for a stronger business call versus a weaker one.

Marylou: Yeah, definitely. David, thank you so much for joining us today. For everyone who’s listening, the book that were speaking about today is called Hyper Connected Selling. David, let us know how we can get ahold of you, where the book is being sold etc. We’re going to put a page together with all your stuff on it and that way they can connect when they’re not driving, or whatever you guys are doing right now as you’re listening to this, to get that book. Let us know, first and foremost, how we can get ahold of you, and what other books we think would be relevant that you’ve put together that we can take a look at especially now with the holidays coming up, lots of reading time, everybody’s getting their book list together. If you can give us a help there, that’d be great.

David: Absolutely. My website is the best place to start. Actually, we’ve got a landing page specifically for all of your fantastic listeners. That’s at davidjpfisher.com/podcast/predictable.

Marylou: Oh, perfect.

David: You can get all of my contact information there. You can also find me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/iamdfish and on Twitter @dfishrockstar. I encourage your listeners to reach out, love to connect, love to talk to people, love to talk sales and how to use these skills to actually get better results. All of my books, there is this website that I think is […] legs called Amazon.

Marylou: Yes, I think we kind of know about that a little bit, yeah.

David: All my books are available there. You can just search Hyper Connected Selling by David Fisher. They’re on Kindle, audio, and paperback.

Marylou: Wonderful. Thank you so much for attending the podcast today. Also, for everyone listening, these are the skills, as David mentioned, we are in a very hyper automated environment right now, technology is available for practically everything but the human connection and the ability to leverage technology where it makes sense, and use your humanness in the rest of that spot is still something that we really need to work on.

Let’s face it, I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve seen just over the last nine months, people are starting to crave that human interface again. The in face-to-face is coming back, trade shows are becoming good again, so don’t lose sight of the fact that this is ebbing and flowing. We have multiple tools in our arsenal but our voice, our being, our person is at the core of all of that.

David, thank you so much again for hanging out with me today, very much appreciate your time.

David: I had a blast. Thanks for having me.

The goal of the prospector is to generate good leads and close sales, and sometimes it’s worth seeking out options from someone who operates differently than the way that you do in order to improve your techniques.

Today’s guest is Peter Lang, CEO and founder of the Uhuru Network Uhuru is a company that drives client success by increasing monthly leads, generating site visitors and more. Listen to the episode to hear more about how Peter’s company works, what the onboarding process looks like for Uhuru’s clients, and how the GDPR affects Peter’s business.

Episode Highlights:

• Why Peter was interested in offering agency instead of in-house
• The typical onboarding process for Peter’s clients
• How the selection of accounts works
• How to add value while disqualifying at the same time
• Why providing value by giving away something that other companies charge for is a way to stay competitive
• How the GDPR affects Peter’s model in other countries
• The steps it takes to close the data range

Resources:

Peter Lang

Uhuru Network

Peter’s Email: plang@uhurunetwork.com

Transcript: 

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler coming to you, actually video today, which is unusual. I have to get dressed and all that good stuff. I was telling Peter my guest that my office look like a tornado had hit, but luckily, it looks pretty good now for all of you, I hope. Today’s guest is Peter Lang. He is CEO and cofounder of a company called you Uhuru. The reason why I think you’re going to love this particular podcast is because Peter and I have fundamentally, different views on some of the items within setting up an agency and also how the teams work together.

I’m very interested in how he’s implemented his solution. I want him to share with you what he’s done because a lot of times, we get stuck in this, “Oh my gosh, I need to hire full-time employees for the sales development role or for the marketing rep role.” whatever it is that you’re looking for. Whether it’s inbound or outbound referral but we also think collocation that they should be together because that allows them to learn faster, to play off each other, to role play and to bring that energy up that we need in the business development area that I think we need. Peter is going to talk about why that may not be the case. Peter, welcome to the show today.

Peter: Thank you, Marylou for having me. It’s going to be fun to share our we built a distributed at predictable sales process that is counter intuitive to everything you believed.

Marylou: Exactly. Without further ado, how did you pull this up? We’re taking fundamental things that I believe in, for example like collocation, but you’re saying no, it’s trending differently now and you have a lot to say about that. Why don’t you tell us first about why you got started with this type of offering? Why agency versus in-house? That was the selling point in your mind to go ahead and invest your time, energy, effort, expertise, money into doing this type of offering for clients.

Peter: Great question. We built an international digital marketing agency and so I use the word international as a key part of that. All of our clients are located all over the world, they’re distributed. We thought about building a team and scaling a team both from a client services standpoint but also from a sales team standpoint. It just made sense to have the interaction that we have with our accounts, our clients, that’s distributed and remote be the same for us internally. Never mind the overhead advantage that comes with having a distributed remote team.

We started looking at the benefits and looking at what we could achieve with it. It was a no brainer, while the world is trending towards remote telecommunication was in question many decades ago and now it’s showing that you can be productive. You can work from your home office, you can work from anywhere in the world, you can accommodate and accomplish many things organizationally that you’ve been tasked with when brought into a company. We’ve applied that into our sales organization.

Marylou: Share with us the typical onboarding process for a client. I know you mentioned before we got live today that this applies to whether you’re selling a widget, this applies whether you have a high technology product, is that correct if it’s multiple industries? Walk us through the onboarding of a client and what would we need to give to you in order to be able to hit the ground running, be productive and start ramping up towards our numbers.

Peter: It’s helpful to describe the sales process and that will help identify the transference of knowledge that goes on at each stage of that.

Marylou: Perfect.

Peter: We believe that we have to identify a good fit, and this is something you talk about in your book, deals with the ideal persona. We have a prospect fit matrix. We determine a select criteria for company and personal or the individual that we’re trying to speak to that really clearly identifies if we can help them. Now, what’s been most important is, in order for us to do that, is we need to know their situation. But oftentimes, when I get emails from SaaS technology companies that say, “Hey Peter Lang, can I talk about my demo?” My phone responses, “I don’t give a damn about your demo.”

When we don’t care about the thing that you’re talking about, you don’t have conceptual commitment. Our entire sales process was built to get conceptual commitment before advancing any level of value. I’ll get specific on this from an outbound perspective because it’s one my favorite. Even though we focus on inbound as an agency, the outbound side of it is probably the most interesting for you and kind of helps me come back to this distributed model.

Outbound, as a whole, I believe, and we’ve created a process around this where you have to get prospects to raise your hand, something that you’ve recognized through your work with Aaron Ross, something that you preach in your books. We thought, okay, the agency model where it’s really commoditized to services and agencies don’t typically do their own service very well. How can we get people to raise their hand because we don’t want to compete when they’re looking for an agency? That’s not a good space to be in with any prospect when they’re in evaluation of another provider.

You have a lot of, what feels to be bravado, in the sales process to put you ahead of the competition. We ask for conceptual commitment which is if we provide you with value upfront with no obligation, would you spend a few minutes to review. That’s the first yes, we’re trying to achieve. Pretty simple. If they say yes, this can be positioned for a long sale cycle—ours is 45 days—but if you can position this value offering and get them to raise their hand saying, “Yes, the thing that you’re providing I would find valuable enough to dedicate a few minutes to review it.” then you’re able to say, “Okay, let me prepare something.” this is the targeted account trendy language that everyone hears about today. I’ll prepare something specifically tailored for you, so I can provide you with value. That’s our first interaction point from outbound and inbound.

Now, what’s most important is the objective of that is not to have a call. There’s another set of outbound sales depending on how you describe your pipeline process which we’re not trying to drive a call, we’re trying to get acknowledgment of the pain point based on the value we presented. It’s conceptual commitment and then acknowledgement of pain. If that’s the genesis of any conversation we have, it takes a lot of effort from a sales rep to create that and so when you talk about having an office environment where sales teams are ringing bells, getting motivated by deals closing and that kind of enthusiasm, it doesn’t give or harness real focus of the sales rep.

Sales reps need to in our sales process to deliver value have to be really focused on the individual they’re talking to. We found it’s been very helpful for them to be remote than to work from a home office or from another location where their primary focus is set into delivering that value, not in the energy around closing deals. Does that make sense?

Marylou: It makes perfect sense.

Peter: This whole mechanism is an acknowledgement of effort we get per rep around 10 raise of someone’s hands per week. Our deal values go from anywhere, if you look at just LTV, it’s half a million. We are a 45-day consultative MRR, retain service, high-valued, lot of educational sales process and we’re able to get 10 people to raise their hands not inbound, these are outbound prospects who acknowledged our outreach.

When we create that model, and we say, “Okay, now we’ve given our sales rep the ability to implement this themselves, they get to control their own environment, describe their own destiny and make it happen, then they don’t need…” Again, they don’t need the reinforcement of the highs and lows that being in an office together really stimulates. Oftentimes, when there’s so much failure in the sales organization just because of low conversion rates, the energy of the sales team can kind of build each other up to keep pushing through and have that drive. When we built a positive success and predictable exercise through outbound sales, you don’t need that motivation of that uplifting environment.

Marylou: Okay, so let’s stop there. You mentioned of the account-based methodology, for lack of a better term. My question to you there is, I’m remote, I have my accounts that I’ve been assigned, is that how it works? Or is it, I’d go in and see what’s available and pull what I want, does it really matter? How does this selection of accounts work? Are you in this value theme trying to get these distributed reps to focus on certain segments of the market or are they experts in multiple persona types? I’m a little bit confused there, how that would work and if do they switch their languaging based on who it is they’re contacting?

Peter: I talked about a prospect fit matrix, very common language in sales. The key thing for us was identifying typical issues. There’s a difference between prospect fit and typical issues and typical issues allow us to tailor messaging and tailor the communication necessary to gain one’s attention. If I know what you are working from a home office, I already know the typical issues you face sitting at your computer day-to-day.

If I know the environment, I can already identify what to communicate with you. How we do that is we define it by technology. For us, it’s marketing automation. There’s a level of sophistication of our prospect that’s needed to hire or be qualified to hire someone like us. A lot of organizations have this. If you are pointing after CSOWs, there’s a level of sophistication that’s required for them to understand the value that you’re providing.

We need to qualify that value, and for us, it’s indicators of certain technology platforms. The very common way of creating databases. You can take HubSpot, Marketo as great examples. If a company of a certain revenue size has technology on marketing automation, were able to generate a list based from the regions, qualify that or filter that based upon executive positions.

We use a great tool, the founder of Growbots, if you haven’t heard of it, Greg, he got my attention with an email referencing you and Aaron Ross. He said, “I see you follow Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler on Twitter, our solution makes it easier to practice predictable prospecting.” He understood that. When we had our initial conversations, it just sparked me in saying, “Okay, he understood who he was talking to base on who I was following, based on someone that know social selling, enriching data.” And so, we use that same approach and the rep was able to say, “Okay, I’m going to email.” because we use outbound email–really effective. We don’t believe in cold calling. We don’t want to talk to anybody who doesn’t want to talk to us. Sales reps don’t enjoy it, people just typically don’t enjoy it, and so we are always in the position of they want to have a discussion with us for us to provide them with value.

It’s a win-win engagement throughout the sales process and our rep’s morale is higher because of it. The other most incredibly important aspect of that is, “Okay, we’ve now identified a list that we’re going to email based off of a company criteria within verticals.” We do know that typical issues of individuals with certain marketing automation technologies within certain verticals have similar issues in the implementation of their marketing sales organizations. They were able to craft that messaging based on that.

Marylou: You do segment as much as possible to get the conversation be more succinct and aligned with the person or the persona as we call it.

Peter: Correct.

Marylou: Okay, very good. Alright, that was my first question. Another question I have about that is, let’s say I am working with a pathologist and they’re looking at a microscope-based solution, a digital microscope versus a scanner. Depending on the sophistication of the institution, there are certain disqualifiers that I want to ask upfront or want to know upfront that are not going to be in some database somewhere specifically.

How do you add value and yet disqualify at the same time because at top of the funnel, we’re working with a lot more records and our goal is to try to get them to the meaningful conversations that you’re talking about. We have to go through some sort of process where technology still is not enriching the data enough for us to know whether we have all of the you know eyes dotted and teeth crossed so that we can have a more meaningful conversation and focus in on that value. We still need to know certain things before we can start that conversation. How does that fit into this when the databases are still not quite ready to give us all the information that we need in order to know the fork in the road before you we make that phone call or before we send that email?

Peter: Great question. This is a fundamental aspect of what we implemented to work with others. You’re trying to get someone’s attention. The most important factor from our vantage point is to create a database of individuals who fit the prospect criteria. Whether or not they’re actively looking to purchase is another step. At the end of the day, we’re trying to create a database of known contacts that are in organizations and in positions of authority–so decision makers, who fit our criteria whether or not they’re in a purchase decision today.

That’s the most important piece. When we talk about how do we uncover the information in our sales process to identify what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in, whether or not we’re trying to gather that, I’ll run through how we do it and show how that can be mirrored with other organizations. The first one is we’ve sent an offer to provide value upfront, we deliver on that offer. We send it with no obligation to have a phone call with us.

We give you the thing we said we’re going to give you. It’s not an e-book that was already written, it wasn’t something that was already crafted. We have systemized it so it’s efficient to produce, and it’s less time-intensive, and we’ve automated the ability to do that through business development reps focus on it. You guys preach this where a sales rep shouldn’t be doing prospecting where you’re trying to remove them from the repetition work, […] and have them focus on high-value which is providing that value and taking that call and then you jump on the next call.

We are able to connect call, many do. On that call, it’s based on the understanding of the value we’ve already delivered. Our objective is to make sure the prospect we’re sitting in front of understands the thing we gave them and in that we say, “We will also have additional follow up questions to help us determine or bridge the gap between the things we’ve identified which are surface level, we don’t have access to your accounts, we don’t know what’s going on at your organization and more systemic issues and these typical are usually the case.

Marylou: Okay, I got you. It’s giving upfront a more generic—even though it is personalized because you’re saying it’s systematically personalized or data driven, as I like to call it, but there is a uniqueness to it that is given upfront, and then after they’re starting to engage, then you gently bring them through, what I will call, a disqualification. In my world, we have, “Are we really a good fit? Is this a waste of my time?” I’m trying to get in my head, is the waste of my time call preceding the gift?

Peter: Here’s the interesting thing. If you are targeting, we’ve already identified that the company and the context typically fit based off of success. We’re not wasting our time talking with people who are in companies that don’t typically hire agencies. We know we’re already having initial conversation with a higher probability of success than the fact or would be otherwise. This is why the targeting is so important because if you’re just spamming and then going aggressively to anyone who will breathe into the microphone when you hop on the phone with them, you’re going to have to have a qualification criteria to be more rigid. We don’t.

Marylou: If the data is available. It’s not always available that’s the problem. We get the total addressable market which is what you’re talking about. Predictable revenue was like the market and now we said, “No, we got to segment.” and now it’s a total addressable market but we’ve even taken it further to say, “What’s the total serviceable market?” Sometimes there’s not enough data points to help us go from the total addressable market to the total serviceable market. We’ve got to do some level of disqualification still.

Peter: And we do that through the touch point that we’re providing value. Just by the thing that we’re sending, where they raise their hand for acknowledgement, they’re also indicating that they have that type of problem.

Marylou: That thing is something that interested in […].

Peter: But you have to get conceptual commitment at each stage so progressive yes is the way they […]. The fact that they said yes to our initial offer and who we sent it to, our feedback loops of how we’re going to effectively communicate throughout the sales process. I’ll use this one as a good example. You have a chief revenue officer who’s concerned with inbound sales funnels. Basically, how their sales team is receiving marketing qualified leads in the qualification criteria for that progression SQL and action, that’s all different than having a marketing director who’s concerned with the performance of their e-books and their content marketing.

Based on the first interaction point, we’re able to qualify the pain point before we even have the initial call. This is what’s really important, we try to only have conversations with almost pre-screened—because it’s not qualified, we haven’t spoken to them—but pre-screened prospects who are confident that there’s an opportunity. Now, it’s our job to identify fit as you would like to say, we use the same terminology, but our next step of the sales process helps us do that. We do a business assessment as a requirement.

Marylou: Okay, business assessment is upfront?

Peter: Upfront. Another thing that other companies charge for, I firmly believe that if you want to have a competitive edge, you got to give away the thing that other people are charging for. If you really understand the value you bring to them, and for us, it’s not telling you and teaching you what the problem is and how to solve it, it’s solving it for you. There’s not an objection from our standpoint to tell you everything you need to know about the problem you need to solve because that’s not why you hire us.

We have a clear understanding of our delivery and our value to our prospects–that helps us be able to craft that message. This is a requirement. If you think you know what it is that you have as a problem and you’re hiring an agency for, it’s not that we don’t believe you, but we don’t believe you. The strong statement is, you’re not qualified to hire us oftentimes. It could be bandwidth issues, it could be experience issues, it’s our responsibility and Jay Abraham always talked about the fiduciary responsibility of the company to guide you through this process and we believe that fully.

We require a business assessment, and then in the gathering of that is a nondisclosure agreement, we gather all the intelligence and we have a completed business assessment, our probability of close goes up to 75%.

Marylou: In the world of, what is the number now, it’s depressing, I think it’s between 10% and 20% close rates on average for the industry now. It’s just pathetic.

Peter: Yeah, it’s because you’re really not motivating. Now, I want to be very clear, we do not accept everyone. We’ve defined that as a part of us and we recommend other organizations do the same. If you incentivize your sales reps purely for closing deals and not filtering those deals based on quality, like them really understanding how that needs to be a priority for them, then you’re going to have unsuccessful conversions. You’re going to have customers who are unhappy with the service they’re providing on a product that they purchased and that’s going to dilute the brand value overall, and it makes the sales process more tedious. Convincing really isn’t a great fit in trying to find fit.

Ian Altman talks about the framework of same side selling. You should be on the same side as your prospect in trying to figure out if they’re going to be a good fit to move forward. When you take that approach, again, your conversion rate is going to be much higher because you’ve really vetted the process. We don’t always move people to a business assessment, we clearly say, “You know what, based on the connect call, we’re going to leave you better than we found you. We’ve given you upfront value, feel free to leave us a review, that the engagements that you have or me as the rep, leave me a comment on LinkedIn, but we’re not a great fit to help you.” We promote that type of positive energy out there and that always come back to enhance everything that we’re doing.

Marylou: It’s so important. I think in the long run, even back when Predictable Revenue was written, the Predictable Revenue formula talked about high lifetime value, high revenue, high likelihood of closing and then high referral. By definition, they’re loyal, so that helps build those other two channels of inbound and referral. It’s not all about outreach and we preached that a long time. Somewhere along the line, it got to this crazy thing, I think because of email where we just decided, “It’s okay to spam people.” But now GDPR is sort of reeling us back in saying, “No, you can’t just email people.” I’m curious you said you worked all over the world, does this model of ebb and flow based on the requirements of the country and GDPR? How does that work now if our lists are going to get really tiny?

Peter: Yup, so we look at the prospect universe. The available universe that we have to prospect from are data source leads and we look at how that information is available to us. Number one is, you don’t use a US company to do your prospecting list. To be more mindful to the legalities or the legal restrictions in outbound sales if you’re doing anything for list building, use a European company. Use one that has a legal environment that’s already restrictive and that default applies to the US.

The company we use is based in Poland. They have a really strong view of European regulation that is evident through the tool even though we’re using it in the US and then we also centralize. I mean ideally, even for our more sophisticated offering, we’re still restricted to Europe, Australia, US and Canada. It’s just with the currencies and level of sophistication of our offering those are the markets that responded best. To make it easy, that’s the recommendation. You got to use a company that is already embedded in it to where their standard procedures don’t have you questioning your tactic.

Marylou: Okay. At what point in the pipeline does the agency disengage or do you take it all the way to close for your client base?

Peter: We take all the way to close. What we’ve built is, I have it off screen time so I’m going to look away, but I can give you how many steps it takes to close the data range and the specifics.

Marylou: Let’s do it. I […] who are on this podcast.

Peter: I’ll give you the most important aspect and this is, whenever we ask a company how standardized their operating procedures are from a marketing and sales organization and they don’t have these specifics, it’s very hard for them to have the performance data to make insightful decisions. We always say, “You have to know this information if you want to improve it.” You have to weigh yourself before you try to lose some weight. I will run you through it.

Assuming that we have the first call, the connect call is from an individual who’s either come to us with a problem or they raised their hand, we then do a business assessment and on that assessment, we gather business intelligence not directly tied to our service offering. If you only ask questions that are one tier away or one degree away from your offering, you don’t really care about the company. We get all the business intelligence necessary for us to make insightful decisions as if we were—because we’re an outsourced marketing department, essentially—as if we were an employee. We need to know what’s important to the business or at least important decision makers around us.

We get that call from connected to exploratory where we go over the business assessment with them and highlight the areas that are our concern. Areas that probably is an area of focus for us to help them is about a week. It takes about seven days from that completion. The connect call to the completion of their business assessment to the next call. Pretty straightforward. And they want this, they’ve actively engaged, we’re putting hurdles in front of them which is the conceptual commitment.

By accepting our initial offer is a yes, by showing up on the first call is a yes, by completing our business assessment, it’s a yes. You’re seeing a progression of commitment demonstrated by our prospects which is increasing the probability of close. The next step of that once it’s done, we then have to do our due diligence. Like with financial advisors, I will not tell you how to invest your money without looking at your account.

We’ve created a diagnostic process, which is an internal one. We do complementary what other companies charge for. We’ve also systemized that through standard operating procedures that identify a lot of those typical issues and criteria to complete those diagnostics, and then from there, we’d hop on a call to review our findings like the doctor who’s giving you a prescription and we’d say, “This is our prescription.” it’s pretty straightforward. You’ve gotten them all the way to this point, you’ve now shown evidence that you can help them, but our objective is not a client conversion in the diagnostic, it’s called a confidence rating.

Our team needs to be greater than 90% confident we can achieve the desired results shared with us through our business assessment and supported by the evidence in our diagnostic to move forward. If you’re not, do not close the deal.

Marylou: Yeah.

Peter: That typically goes into another week. Each of these, we try to give a week, we call them a sprint because we do operate sales in our business organization off of these […] rituals, and we have sales and client services offerings as well. We try to do these at a sprint by sprint basis.

Marylou: Okay. In adding value way, you typically go through the same process that I’m thinking most people that understand predictable revenue go through. First, you’re determining, “Is this is a waste of my time?” but you do it in a way that you’re segmenting the database so that your probability of having richer records exist before you start this process. Then you’re looking for some high-level disqualification we call the AWAF call, “Are we a fit? Is it a good fit for us? Shall we continue?” and then working at all the way through to, “Should we work together?” But you’re adding value for these steps where I’m more looking at my feelings about working with the prospect saying, “Is this going to be a high probability account that will close with high lifetime value and high revenue potential for the company?”

You’ve done it in a way that’s very relationship-oriented. Shoulder-to-shoulder came to my mind when you were talking about it because we are working hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder with our prospects so that they understand—if it doesn’t end up that we take them as a client—they understand the why and they know where they need to go. They have the blueprint now of what they need to do, should they want this type of offering in the future.

Peter: My favorite statement is, “I can give you the playbook, but you want to hire my players.” At the end of the day, I can tell you exactly how to solve your problem but there’s a reason why people watch a lot of weight loss videos and a lot of exercise programs, they don’t want to do the work. We’re very aware of that behavior within our prospects to feel like they can do it, be motivated, want to learn everything they can and then be told that, “You don’t have to. We’re going to do this for you.” that changes it to be a more emotional transaction which is the key. They have to feel that you’re on their side and they have to believe it. This isn’t fake. We’re not saying this because it’s a good tactic to implement in our sales organizations for us to be effective. If you’re not genuine in these interactions, you will be unsuccessful.

Marylou: Yeah, it’s a so much healthier way to work.

Peter: It’s just happier. Tie this to the distributed environment, it’s a lot easier to motivate people when the sales process inherently built to create value and be enjoyable rather than be negative. It is true, if you’ve identified a targeted universe of prospects and you want to aggressively go after it with no care to the health and mindset and effects to your sales organizations because you’re trying to drive for some investor-backed objective, then yeah, it’s very difficult to hire these people remote. Because they’re going to need your embrace, they’re going to need culture to stay motivated, and you’re going to have a churn rate of 12 to 24 months pretty easily. But if you create an environment that’s pleasurable for both parties, a win-win, then people can work anywhere and be successful with it and they really enjoy what it is they do every day.

Marylou: Wow, this has been great. We’re running out of time here. I would love for people to know where to contact you and just so you know, Peter, I’ll create a page on my website that they know to come to, to download anything you would like and get your contact information, but in the meantime, if they’re driving along saying, “I want to know more about Peter.” How do we reach you? What’s the best way for us to get a hold of you?

Peter: The easiest way is going to be very uhurunetwork.com. Take a look at our site. We practice what we preach. We have an entire consultative guide that was based off of our call recordings, transcribed it with insightful direction and information, and a lot of resources. I’m open, peter@uhurunetwork.com. I put my email out there in the world. My biggest ask is, if you email or reach out, have it be specific, have it demonstrate an area of weakness that I can provide guidance in, that’s the most productive way.

Marylou: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time. Everybody, I think this is a great way for us to really look at as we’re going into 2019—we’re recording this in November of 2018—it’s a good way for us to look at the balance of in-house versus outsourcing, but also collocation versus distributed and get an understanding of the benefits that are coming before us. We’re getting a younger workforce, they’re used to more freedom than what we old timers were used to, and the community aspect is in their DNA in a lot of respects. They want to be able to engage with their fellow people and we have the tools to do that now.

Before it was, “I don’t want you to be out there in the middle of nowhere and I can’t get a hold of you. I can’t see you. I can’t know what you’re doing.” We have full accountability no matter where we are in the world. The ability to pick where you want to live and perform the work you want to perform with the value that Peter’s been talking about is a win-win for everybody. Thanks again Peter for being on the show. I very much appreciate your time.

Peter: Thank you, Marylou.

When you want to know how to sell effectively at the executive level, you need expert training and stories that sell. Today’s guest has been called Australia’s leading Authority on “C” Level sales. Steve Hall has sold to executives in more than 20 countries. He is a writer and speaker who focuses on executive sales. He also owns the Executive Sales Coaching LinkedIn group.

Steve Hall is Managing Director of Executive Sales Coaching Australia and joint founder of Executive Sales Forum International. Steve joins the podcast today to talk about how to use story when you’re talking to decision-makers and how you can tell an effective story in less time – sometimes in just a few words. Listen to the episode to hear what Steve has to say about developing stories, finding the information that you need when you talk to clients, and his Executive Sales Forum International.

Episode Highlights:

• How Steve uses story when he speaks to decision-makers
• How it can be helpful to tell a story in only a few words
• How to get enough time with a prospect to tell your story properly
• The juxtaposition between what is and what should be in your story
• What Steve uses to help find information that helps in talking to clients
• Steve’s thoughts on how new salespeople just out of college are assigned
• How much product knowledge is necessary to get in the door
• Steve’s Executive Sales Forum International

Resources:

Steve Hall

Executive Sales Forum International

Transcript: 

Marylou: Hi, everyone. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Steve Hall. He is Australia’s leading C Level Sales Authority, and he says he’s never been challenged on that, so we’re going to go with that. Steve is an expert on that bullseye that we know about, that center of the bullseye, starting conversations with the decision maker, and getting to the point where they are salivating about wanting to have further conversations with us in order to find out if there’s a good fit, and how we go about working together.

He’s also working on another project which I’m going to ask him about later called the Executive Sales Forum International. For those of you, if that’s piqued your interest which it did mine, time permitting, I’ll ask Steve to talk about it. If we don’t have time, we’ll put all the information on his page, so that if you’re interested in that forum, contact Steve and he will get you all dialed-in and set-up. Welcome, Steve, to the podcast.

Steve: Welcome from a sticky Sydney.

Marylou: Oh, Steve. That’s right. It’s summer there.

Steve: It is. We have the air conditioning on but at the moment it is quite warm.

Marylou: Oh, wow. You have shorts on and a Hawaiian top or something, right?

Steve: I actually have on shorts and a Tour de France t-shirt.

Marylou: There you go. Very good. I saw in your LinkedIn profile that you listed yourself as one of the many things that you do well, storyteller. I am really excited about storytelling. As I told you offline, I met the author of Seven Stories Every Salesperson Should Know. We can talk a little bit about that, but I really got interested in how the heck do we pull together an intriguing, engaging, memorable story at the top of funnel when we’re just starting to introduce ourselves into an account.

You’re gonna take us through the decision maker—how you get in, what you need to say, how you prepare and all that. My question to you upfront is do you also use story in order to start the conversation with your decision makers?

Steve: The answer’s simple: yes. I must say, by the way, that Mike Adams’ book is excellent and Mike’s a really nice guy.

Marylou: Our folks have gotten his information from the podcast a couple weeks ago. For those of you who don’t remember, go back a couple of episodes, and you’ll be able to see Mike’s book.

Steve: For a second, let’s look at the prospect we’re talking to. Let’s assume we’re trying to get through to a company and the C level executives in that company and look at their lives, the important people they’ve got. We’re not just competing with our competitors to speak. We’re competing with anyone who wants a slice of their time: their boards, their shareholders, their peers, their reports, their customers, their suppliers, and anyone else that want to sell them anything. There’s an awful lot of people competing with their time.

The first question is why should they waste their time even talking to you in the first place or even reading your emails? In order to get them to do that, you need a story, and the story might just be—I’ll call it a value proposition. I’m a big fan of a lot of value propositions—but you need a reason to get them to talk to you rather than somebody else. That’s a story even if it’s only a few words. Does that make sense?

Marylou: Total sense. It immediately raises this sort of anxiety in so many people, me included, of, “How can I have a story in a couple of sentences? How does that flow? How does that work? How does it resonate so quickly?”

Steve: Well, you can tell a story in a very few words. I don’t know if you know Al Stewart who’s an English singer but who actually lives in California. One of his songs, he tells a story in five words: bar conversation, animation, anticipation, disinformation. There’s an entire story in five words.

You can do it, but you need to think. I’ll give you an example. About six years ago in Haven, Australia someone approached us and said, “Look, we’re with digital agency. We’re really good once we get to speak to senior executives, but we’re not very good at getting to see them. They’re just too busy. Can you help us?” We said, “Yes, okay. Who’s your target audience?” They said, “Well, really we can do anything for anyone.” I said, “Well, that’s not terribly useful because we need to focus on someone, so is there any particular industry you have credibility in? and they said, “Yeah, we’ve got quite a few customers in retail.” I said, “Okay, great. What do you do for them?” “Well, we can do anything.” But if I go to someone and say, “I can do anything,” it’s not going to really cut through. Let’s look at retail, they chose an audience. What’s the biggest problem retailers have got that you can help them with?

Now at that time—not right now—but at that time there’s a huge furor in Australia about international competition from online retailers. We created a message which was essentially a very short story, and that message was, “We want to talk to you. We’ve got a guy, Simon Van Wyk, he’s a digital expert, and we want to schedule a meeting between you and him to talk about helping you compete better with online retailers.” We reached out to various retailers, and we got meetings with I think 35 C level executives out of 90 retailers we approached. That was a very simple short story about what we wanted to do. It’s about something they cared about. Incidentally, what I just did, of course, was tell you a story about a story.

Marylou: You sure did. Was this person very famous so that there was a name recognition right away to say, “Oh my gosh. This person is the top of their field. Of course I want an audience with this person.”

Steve: There was a degree of that. He wasn’t internationally or nationally famous, but he was well-known. If you looked him up, you will find him. The thing is, you use what you’ve got and what we have with him was someone that had a degree of profile. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t have done it that way, but because he did, that’s what we used.

There’s a combination of things you use when you’re building a story. One is the audience. Who is your audience? What do they care about? How do we use a story that hits the buttons they care about? And then as yourselves and the thing that you want to talk about and how can we—I hate the word pitch—how can we pitch what we want to talk about in a way that resonates with that particular person?

Marylou: I just had a conversation this morning with someone about this pitch. I know we don’t like to use that word, but that’s what it is, so let’s use it. But he was saying, “The pitch is really helping. Yes, it’s asking for things, but it’s demonstrating value by giving first.”

Steve: First of all, you got to work out what your objective. What do we want? Your first objective is to get enough of their attention so you can tell them the longer story. Again, I don’t like this argument about which is best, cold calling or social media because to me, their all channels to get our message across. But whether you’re doing it via LinkedIn or email or a phone conversation or via referral, what’s your first objective? Your first objective is to get enough of their time to tell your story properly.

I don’t know if you sail, I don’t, but I know that if you’re on a boat and you want to get a hawser, you know one of those really thick ropes they use on boats to tie them up?

Marylou: Yup.

Steve: If you want to get a line between two boats, you can’t throw the line across, you’ve got to send it across to the […], it’s too heavy. You send it across a rock or a stern, tied to a bit of string which is tied to a bit of rope, and then you pull in the hawser. It’s the same with storytelling. You have more story, which gets their attention enough to tell another story, and then the stories get more detailed, more involved, and you pull them in more, show them how you can help them more. Does that make any sense?

Marylou: It does. I have a question about that. We had a book here a few years ago called, I think it was Resonate by Nancy Duarte. She focused on there has to be a juxtaposition in your story. What is, what could be, a contrast to jolt somebody? Do you agree with that concept?

Steve: I haven’t come across it before. But it makes a degree of sense. A lot of stories—a lot of comedy as well—but a lot of stories depend upon that unexpected turn, but again, I think it depends on the stage that you’re at. I mean, Mike talks about seven stories of different stages of the sales process. If we’re talking top of funnel, and getting people’s attention, and getting them to want to know more, then there’s a limit on how much time we’ve got to tell that story. It’s going to be a pretty short story.

Marylou: Short story but with an imbalance built into it of some sort. Otherwise, this is a story and, “Oh, that was a nice story.” But there has to be some sort of actionable piece to it to get people to jolt them from complacency into wanting to act.

Steve: Well, it’s a question of giving to want to know more. It’s not unlike a newspaper headline. In fact, it’s very much like a newspaper headline. A newspaper headline is designed to grab your attention and makes you want to read the story. A prospecting story should make them want to know more and therefore agree to your 20-minute meeting or your longer phone conversation, or whatever it is. You need to generate curiosity but it needs to be curiosity about something that they care about. The precursor to that is you need to know what they care about and know what they don’t care about and that’s your product and service.

Marylou: Exactly, features. Product features it does all these things.

Steve: Or even benefits. When you’re talking features and then benefits, sure if you got this great product that has all these great benefits, that’s wonderful, but how do you know which benefit is relative to that particular person in the current circumstances?

Let me give you an example. Just supposing you’re a company whose sales are down or whose profits are down. You were making 10% profit and now you’re making a loss. That’s a big problem, right?

Marylou: Right.

Steve: How many different ways are there that you can solve that problem? Literally hundreds of ways. You can sack people, you can hire more salespeople, you can do some training, you can buy some software, you can do a whole heap of different things to solve that problem. You got to be able to find the problem without just throwing benefits. If the benefits you’re talking about is improving customer engagement, that might be a total disconnect with what they care about at the moment. If you just start with what they care about and work from there.

I’m talking now about selling executive level because if you’re selling to a mass audience, if you’re reaching out to a hundred or a thousand or a million companies, you can’t necessarily do that. But if you’re focusing on a small number of large, strategic targets, you can spend the time to work out what they care about most and then focus on that and how you can help them achieve that.

Marylou: Okay, what we’re talking about then—correct me if I’m wrong—because we’re selling to a smaller audience, we’re going to take the time to hyper personalize, if you will for a lack of a better term, this conversation, for this particular person, at this particular moment in time, with these particular things that he or she cares about as a person, not a representative of people like him or her, this person.

Steve: Yes and it’s a combination. We know that CEOs care about certain things, profit, risk, et cetera. We know that certain industries got certain issues like the retail industry that I was talking about a minute ago. We know that individual companies have individual problems based upon their personal circumstances. It’s a combination of those that gets the message.

We know that if we’re talking to just people in a particular industry, these are the things they’re likely to care about. When we find it, based upon our research, if you’re targeting specific large value customers, if you’re targeting an industry as a whole, you can do what I talked about originally with that retail message, you can come up with an industry message. If you’re targeting an individual company, you will find it based upon what the research on that company, and if we’re targeting an individual person with that company, you can refine it further.

Marylou: Okay. Now, when you’re getting ready for this, the planning process, on average are you leveraging technology to help you find these nuggets of information that are unique to the industry, the audience, the company, the person? Or are we still looking and researching online, reading, downloading, and trying to figure out what that nugget is? What do you typically use as your recipe for gathering this type of information?

Steve: I haven’t yet come across any technology that can do that, or […] against technology but I think that a lot of AI-type technology tends to look at averages and trends, which is good. If you can do that, that gives you a good start but the refinement I talked about, I think has to be done by research and using your imagination.

Marylou: Expand on the ‘using your imagination’ part. I’m interested to hear what that is.

Steve: Einstein came up with the theories that created—among other things—the atomic bomb and nuclear power—by imagining riding on a light wave, wondering what it looked like. I’ll say to myself, if I was that person in that circumstance, what would I care about? Now having said that, there’s a lot of things that can help you. An annual report will tell you an awful lot about what their strategic priorities are.

Again, I’m talking about approaching people at a fairly high level in the organization because again, at different levels of an organization, people care about different things. If you’re implementing a CRM, for instance, the thing that the CEO wants to get out of the CRM will be different from marketing and sales, and from the individual sales people who have to use it.

Marylou: Right. I know that you were say before about the value profit. That term is a little bit overused or not defined properly but we use that term, unique value proposition, in order to uncover the daily tasks that our point person—whoever it is, whether it’s in that bullseye, the decision maker, whether it’s a direct influencer, next level out—we’re looking at their day-to-day life. We put ourselves in their shoes, walking through, what they do, what they’re concerned about, what task they perform, and looking for those gaps of what they’re doing now and how it can be improved or enhanced by putting a product like ours in. We’re looking for the time wasters, the pains, but also the gains that they can get either socially or functionally within the organization or strategically, and now we have this list of potential story topics that we could talk about.

Steve: That’s very well put but that’s different to the traditional value proposition, which is our value proposition is X and you must love it.

Marylou: This is the Marylou Tyler version when we have to have multiple touch points for top of funnel. We have to be able to talk about different things because we may not know, like you said, what the hot buttons are. We try a variety of different conversations, flip it on its side, rather than have one conversation, has a lot of stuff in it. We do multiple conversations that has one hot button topic at a time so that we can see what’s resonating, what’s bubbling to the top, and that’s what we use the unique value proposition for is task-based, not overall ‘here’s what we do, here’s why we matter, here’s why you should love us.’

Steve: We’re talking the same thing, aren’t we? I mean, value is in the eye of the beholder. You’re talking about exploring what the value is to those people that you are talking to. That, to me is the way to do it. Even though my specialty is talking to executive level, that doesn’t mean you ignore the what I rather disrespectfully call them minions, but the minions you need to talk to as well.

One thing you don’t want to do is to spend a lot of time working in the middle of an organization, [00:28:15] up report, and the same what people want, putting a lot of time and effort, only to have the C level people say, “We don’t care about that. Go away.” You also, when you go in directly at C level, you managed to get to speak to a senior executive and they love what you do, at some stage they’re going to pass you off to people underneath and say, “Okay, check them out,” and if they say, “I never heard of these,” or “Doesn’t fit our policy,” they can kill it dead, too. So you need to kill at both levels.

Marylou: Yes. Let’s talk about that for a moment. I am sure you are aware that in the States, especially, we separate out in some companies the sales roles. We have business development teams who’s tasked with starting conversations and getting to a first meeting in some cases, or doing some level of qualification to help determine whether we should be spending time with the prospect, the prospect should be spending time with us. Typically, this is a junior position. What are your thoughts on those poor kids that are coming right out of college, given a list where they’re to target CEOs, CFOs, COOs of companies?

Steve: Actually, I co-wrote an article on this topic a while back with a client of mine. As I’ve mentioned before, I look at things from the perspective of the prospect. If you’re a senior executive, how keen are you that some spotty kid out of school to call you and qualify you and see if you’re big enough fish to keep or whether you’re going to be thrown back or not? Especially if there were 10,000 doing everyday? I think the Junior SDR model is disrespectful, it doesn’t work, it burns through those junior sales people, it annoys the prospects, and it’s a curse on the industry. Is that loud enough?

Marylou: Loud and clear, Steve.

Steve: As I said, if I’m a CEO and I pick the phone and someone’s trying to qualify me, am I a decision-maker? Have I got a budget? Have I got a need? Pardon my French but, push off. Why would I take those calls and less and less people are taking those calls. More and more people are using voice mail, gatekeepers—which I hate that word, too—they’re not reading their emails. The volume of rubbish that’s trying to get through to senior decision makers is swallowing up everyone.

Marylou: What does the ideal sales executive look like in terms of being ready to have these conversations? Is it a 10 year thing? Is it a product knowledge thing? Is it sales skills, mindset, or a combination of the above?

Steve: The most important thing is an understanding of the challenges that the prospect has, the implications and consequences, not with how you can help them solve them but that you can help them solve. In a first conversation, you don’t get to how we fix it. It should be, “I know you’ve got this problem, I know that these are the implications of this problem, and we can help you fix it. Let’s talk further.” No one wants to know how you can do something until they believe you can do it. Does that makes sense?

Marylou: It makes perfect sense. There’s a constant battle that I’m facing with clients about the level of product knowledge that we truly need to open doors and to get in the door. I’ve always pushed for the business case knowledge. Being able to have the conversations in the language of the person that your prospecting to, belly-to-belly, over the phone, whatever you’re doing, but having an understanding.

Like you said, the challenge is being able to language those challenges in their language, the way they speak. And then also pushing up a bit about the implications if they did nothing, if they sat on the fence, and feeling the confidence, the competence to have those conversations because you’re going to eventually turn them over and get them introduced into the people who can get into the bits and bites of the product.

But it’s a tough thing to convince people that really, we need to focus on the business issues, have a high level of product knowledge, but you don’t need to go deep, deep into the weeds to have these conversations especially the higher up you go.

Steve: Well, I’m going to go now, Marylou, because you’re stealing all my thunder.

Marylou: But how do you get that across, Steve? That’s your expertise is how do you act as a change agent, change the minds of these sales managers that they don’t need to do that, that we should focus elsewhere?

Steve: It’s actually quite simple. Just ask them a question. How do you feel when a junior person somewhat try to sell you stuff and knows nothing of it, is trying to push that product on you, without knowing anything about your challenges? Do you take calls from SDRs, from business development people? Do you buy stuff from people who call you up and say, “Hey we got this great list of prospects. Do you want to buy off us?” I guarantee they don’t. They want people to do to others what they want have done to them.

Marylou: Exactly, I hear you but it gets lost in the translation. We all know what we should be doing but to actually do it and actually focus on how to get better at doing it, is a mystery.

Steve: There’s an article on my LinkedIn page about The Terrible Truth About Your Prospects. Or is it The Terrifying Truth? The Terrifying Truth About Your Prospects. The basic message is there’s two terrifying truths about your prospects. One is, they’re just like you, and two is, they don’t care about you, they care about themselves. They don’t care about your new premises, your brand new project, the number of customers you’ve got, your white papers, your case studies, they don’t care about any of those things. They care about their own premises and white papers and customers and prospects. If you want to talk to them, you’ve got to talk to them about what they care about. We’re going back to Dale Carnegie in the 1920s and 1930s talk about the other person, not yourself.

Marylou: Right, How To Win Friends And Influence People. Still on my bookshelf.

Steve: Yup. Great book.

Marylou: Oh, wonderful book. Well, we’re running out of time here. I could talk to you all day, Steve, but I wanted you to give us update on the Executive Sales Forum International in case anyone is like, “Oh my gosh, I want to be good at this. I want to be able to wake up at three in the morning, have Steve just shake me and ask me a question about getting in the door, and I’ll know exactly what to say.” Tell us about this forum, why you came about, and what your expectations are for the actual organization.

Steve: Let me ask you a question. Do you know Tony Hughes?

Marylou: Very well. I love him.

Steve: Okay, well Tony is one of these guys that accepts everything that comes along. He’s working himself to death. About four months, five months ago, I took him to lunch and said, “Tony, you’re killing yourself. You’re working far too hard and you got to cut back,” and he says, “Yes, I know.” He says, “Well look, one thing, I’m chairing these peer advisory groups and it’s taking a lot of my time for this organization. Did you want to take over this group I’m chairing?” I said, “Well, yeah I’ll come along and have a look.”

So I went along and it’s a peer advisory forum. It’s about 14 people there, there’s senior executives, CFOs, CEOs, and it was very good. They talk about each of those issues, they got to know each other, they had a guest speaker, and it was a pretty good session.

We decided I wasn’t going to take over. They merged with someone else when Tony gave up. I thought it’s a really good idea but I could see some problems. One problem was it was in Central Sydney, so I had to get up early, I miss my morning gym session, find a parking spot which cost me a fortune, and by the time we met, had a session, had lunch, my entire day was gone. There was about four people that couldn’t make it for various reasons. They were interstate or they were too busy.

I thought great concept having people in different industries and different levels talking to each other and helping each other, but it’s a big chunk in an executive’s time of day or month, and you’re limited to people in your city. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we did the same sort of thing, but rather than do it face-to-face, we do it online and rather than do it just with people from your local city, we do it internationally?

What we’ve done is we’re setting up an international peer advisory forum with a sales bent, the sales executives, CEOs, chief marketing officers, founders, half from North America, Canada, USA, potentially Latin America, and half from Australia and New Zealand. It will be 12 people, it will be senior executives, and they will get a regular and mostly peer advisory meeting. They’ll also get one-on-one executive coaching for me and my partner and a whole heap of other stuff, because I believe that senior executives, particularly sales-oriented people, they know their industry, they know their customers, they know their products and services, they know their problems, but everyone tends to do the same thing because we’re in a bubble. By expanding that perspective internationally and seeing what other people do in other industries, in other countries, they can learn new things, try new things, and maybe get an edge over their competitors by bringing in ideas from elsewhere.

And that’s the idea Executive Sales Forum International is a group of senior executives that help each other get new ideas, that get executive coaching and that boost their companies, their sales, and their careers to a new level.

Marylou: Wonderful. Well, Steve, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I will put all the information for those of you who would like to speak to Steve on his page. Is there a special place that you’d like us to reach you? Is it LinkedIn? Is it email? If so, give us an idea of where you’d like us to contact you.

Steve: My LinkedIn profile has all of my contact details. The website, which isn’t quite finished yet but will be very soon, for the forum is execsalesforuminternational.com. I’m a great believer in descriptive website names.

Marylou: And it’s all names that we know how to spell, hopefully. It’s always a big problem.

Steve: […] be a problem.

Marylou: Alright, Steve, well again, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure speaking with you.

Steve: Thank you very much, Marylou. It’s a pleasure speaking with you, too. Oh, by the way, I should say, we have also in Executive Sales Forum International a panel of some of the leading sales bloggers, authors, and experts in the world as our executive panel. You’re on it.

Marylou: Oh, my goodness. Lovely. Wonderful. Happy to be there. Have a great evening or it’s actually wait, it is early morning there, late evening here, so have a wonderful day today, Steve. Thanks again.

Steve: Take care.

Marylou: Okay, we’re a wrap. That was great. Thank you so much. This whole story thing is so important and I love the way you broke down the preparation steps of the hierarchy. First, you’re looking at the industry, then you’re looking at the companies within the industry, then the people within the companies, and then the person and the role and task they do. At the end of that is conversation pieces to use to get in the door. I love it.

Steve: You asked some very challenging questions, which is good.

Marylou: Well, good. You answered them all extremely well and I think the audience will gain a lot of insight and I’m hoping that they’ll reach out to you for more information. We’re struggling here in the US, as you know. We think the junior levels can get in the door with the C-Suite and it’s horrific, for lack of a better term. It’s just not working at all. I’m trying to get them to segment out those accounts and have the AEs who do the closing primarily, but have them prospect into these larger accounts that are more strategic in nature, and then train the SDR, co-team it, if you will, until they get up to speed and feel comfortable, rather than destroying them in there with Rolodex and a list and say, “Go.”

Steve: The funny thing is that the most important part of the [00:41:40] is the open. Not the close, the open, and we’re giving that to the most junior inexperienced people.

Marylou: Yes, it’s really funny when you say that because the cache is around the close. The opening of the door is not as highly thought of. This is US. I can’t speak for Australia but here, all of the professionals in the cache, as I said, is around getting to close. It’s not getting to prospecting. It’s not the first getting in the door. It’s not treated with the same dignity, I guess, as the other. I’m try to change that but it’s still very difficult here in the US.

Steve: If you’re talking insurance, maybe that’s the case. But if you’re selling $100,000 or a million dollar thing, software, whatever it might be, you can’t get in to make that decision by a smart technique. Will you have one COMR too? What color would you like your CRM?

Marylou: Right. I have a client right now that’s got pathologist and scientist who are in the bullseye in that center. It’s a disservice to try to reach out to them if in fact they don’t have the precursor set, the before call planning is what I call it. There’s steps upon steps upon steps of preparing for these types of calls. They’re not asking for the referral down. They’re asking for time on the calendar with the pathologist, with the scientist.

It’s a difficult conversation to begin with because of the persona but we’re seeing that it’s probably a better idea to offload some of those larger accounts to the account executive and have them prospect into those strategic accounts, with the SDR side-by-side, shoulder-to-shoulder, so they can listen to the dialogue, understand the business use cases first, and then [weave 00:43:43] those into stories and have the AE be involved with that.

When we tag-team them, it seems to be better. When they go on joint calls, whether it’s virtual or video, it seems to work a lot better. We’re kind of getting back to the daily coaching, role playing, and doing a lot more prep work and planning work before we actually initiate phone calls and emails even.

Steve: That’s the way it used to be done back in the middle ages. I started my post-university career as a medical rep, selling pharmaceuticals to Merck.

Marylou: Oh wow. You were a pharmaceutical rep. That’s a hard, hard job.

Steve: Well, it was different back then. We should take people [00:44:38] and drive them. But when I joined, we spent six weeks in a classroom learning, and we didn’t learn about the drugs. We learned about the conditions. I could talked blood pressure and hypertension and arthritis and things like that. Obviously, I could talk about the drugs, too.

Then, when we finished six weeks of training about medical terminology, hypertension, arthritis, depression, and about the drugs, I then spent the next six months working with an experienced rep going around the doctors [00:45:18]. At the end of that, I could talk to doctors on their terms, in their language, about the conditions that they treated.

Marylou: That’s the way it should be and I think maybe what’s happening here, especially in the tech community is we have the venture capitalists, we have people who are funding these ventures, who don’t understand the market, don’t understand the industry, don’t understand the time it takes to ramp. I’m constantly fighting against that. “What did you do for me lately? Why are we getting our opportunities now?” Well, there’s a ramp here.

It’s definitely a crawl-walk-run situation. We’re not going to hit the ground running just because we have tools. People think because we have tools now, we can just hit more people and then watch the inbound increase and the meeting go up because we’re talking to more people who are leveraging technology. But what I’m trying to fight against, if the sales conversation is not there to begin with, it doesn’t matter if you send one, a thousand, hundred thousand emails. No one is going to respond.

Steve: Again, the question is, how many of your emails do you respond to? How many sales emails do you get? When did you last buy anything based upon a sales email you got?

Marylou: Yeah, very seldom.

Steve: And then why should yours work?

Marylou: Yes, exactly. Well, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. I think it’s going to take a couple of weeks to get this pulled together and I’ll let you know when it’s ready to go. In the meantime, there’s a particular headshot or anything else you want to send to me that I can put on your page, to introduce you, your work, what you’re doing, please feel free to send me the email with that and we’ll make sure we’ll incorporate it into the actual page.

Steve: I’ve just sent you an email with two things: a headshot which looks nothing like me but that’s okay, and also I’ve sent you a link to an article called Why Sales Development Reps Maybe Burning Your Cash.

Marylou: Oh lovely. Could you also send me the link to the one about the prospects that you mentioned on the call? Or can I find it pretty easily on your LinkedIn?

Steve: Yeah. It’s on my profile. It’s got a big monster thing on it.

Marylou: Okay, I’ll find it then.

Steve: The Terrible Truth About Your Prospects. [00:47:41] it was by my friend [John Bedwani 00:47:43]. I actually wrote it for him but he’d be worth interviewing. He’s developed what he calls authentic relationship management. It’s basically the same thing we’re talking about.

Marylou: Lovely. Would you mind introducing us? I would love to interview him for the podcast.

Steve: Very happy to introduce you. He’s very dynamic. He’s very passionate.

Marylou: Oh good. We all are. Wonderful. Well, thanks again, Steve. Have a wonderful day today and I look forward to getting those files and we’ll get you all set-up. I’m sure the audience is going to absolutely love this conversation. Really appreciate it.

Steve: Lovely to talk with you, Marylou.

Marylou: See you later.

Steve: Bye.

Everybody has a story. In fact, everybody has a number of different stories, and one way or another, most people wind up sharing their stories with other people at some point. Stories help us relate to others and make connections as well as illustrate important points. And if you work in sales, you can use your stories to help you connect with prospects and close deals. Today’s guest has literally written the book on how salespeople should use stories.

Mike Adams is an engineer-turned-salesperson from Australia. He’s also the author of the book Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell, a book that’s designed to help those in sales discover the power of stories, what kinds of stories are important in sales, and how you can use stories to help you close. Listen to the episode to hear more about Mike’s background, why he wrote the book and arranged it the way that he did, and how stories can help you connect with your prospects.

Episode Highlights:

• How Mike got into sales
• Mikes book, and why he chose seven as the number of stories to tell
• What kinds of stories are important in sales
• The different ways that different stories help you connect with clients
• Why Mike organized his book the way that he did
• Which stories can help salespeople close a deal

Resources:

Mike Adams

Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell

Transcript: 

Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is Mike Adams, he is the author of the new book, Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell. When I first heard that title, I had a million questions. One is, why seven? The second is, which seven? So I wanted to have Mike on the podcast. I am thrilled that you’re here, Mike. Thank you so much for joining.

Mike: Oh, it’s wonderful to be with you, Marylou. I’m speaking to your audience from Melbourne, Australia. It’s early in the morning.

Marylou: Early morning your time. We talked a little bit before the show, and Mike told me he’s an engineer, I had really felt that kindred spirit, because I, too, am an engineer. I’m a computer science engineer-turned-sales. Tell us your story about how you got involved with the sales process and sales in general.

Mike: Yeah, I trained as an electrical engineer. I had a very adventurous first few years working the oil and gas industry, running electronic surveys, running instruments down oil wells to work out where the oil is. I worked all over Asia during that, Indonesia, and China, in the late 80’s. But I got involved in the software that we used to do the analysis of that data, and I had a frightful meeting with my boss one day, I was working in London, called me into his office, and he had this statement that’s, if you’ve been in big corporations, well, you’ll know what exactly what it means. He said, “Mike, I have a fantastic career opportunity for you.” Career opportunity, so that’s the job no one else wants, right?

Marylou: Right, exactly. Exactly.

Mike: He said, “I want you to go to Norway.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah. Norway, cool.” and be a sales person. Although I don’t want to be a sales person. What I actually said was, “I can’t be a sales person because my wife is eight months pregnant.” But I went home, and she wanted to go to Norway more than I did, and so we flew on the last possible day that she could fly, and I became a sales person. In fact, she’ll tell people that me being on a, it’s 1996, being on a very early mobile phone in the delivery room, instead of doing else.

Marylou: Oh wow, okay!

Mike: I sold the biggest deal in our division, well, what else Schlumberger, it’s a huge oil gas service, this company, and it was a complete accident. I just had the most outrageous good fortune in my first year. That was certainly what kept me in selling because I had the guarantee I could go back and be an engineer. I had some good luck, and that kept me in sales, and I loved it, and I ended up running a sales team in Russia.

And then when it was time to come back to live in Australia, I couldn’t work in the oil and gas industry because Melbourne, where I live now, there really isn’t much oil and gas business. I told a good story, and I got a job in telecommunications, I changed the industry completely, and sold mobile network equipments to big communications carrier here. It’s sort of hundreds of millions of dollars kind of sized business. Then when I figured out how to change industry, I did that four more times.

I think the reason I got involved in consulting was because I had this perspective of the mood of the language, not even have a clue that you’re saying the wrong words, but have to sell, you know. You know, you got to do something in eight months, what is it that you need to know, and stories are a big part of that. Learning to speak out the right stories and know how to engage your client with stories is what I discovered on my own through 20 years of selling and running sales teams. For four years, I’ve been teaching salespeople storytelling, and it’s a lot of fun, and that’s why I wrote the book, to get those ideas a little bit more widely out into the world. And the book’s doing great.

Marylou: Yeah, we, as you know, if we’ve been bombarded here in the last few years because of distractions from our cell phones, from social networks, from the phone, from email. And so, we’re feeling this sort of need to get back to basics, as a human. We all have it in us to tell stories, but it seems certainly daunting, and all your boss tells you is, “Add more storytelling to your sales pitch.”

Mike: That doesn’t help. It doesn’t help, does it?

Marylou: I know, right? When I saw this book, and I saw these seven stories, my question to ask is, “Why seven? Or which seven?” I think we’d want it and answer that, I’m very curious, is it a why seven, or which seven?

Mike: No, well, both are good questions, I think. You’re 100% right. I think the human mental state is distraction these days. We’re just distracted, right? And storytelling cuts through, if we have time I’ll explain the reasons, but seven is about as many things that we can hold in our mind and remember. Seven was, for me, like a maximum. That’s the reason for the number seven. The types of stories in the book Seven Stories are laid out in a sequence. They’re laid out in a buying journey. What story should I tell first? And then what, and then what, and then what–so the story of customer buying.

I use a fishing analogy, it’s funny, I put some 20 rainbow trout in our swimming pool early last year as a little experiment. I had this idea that I was going to invite our neighbors around to fish out of our swimming pool. Because the pool turned green, and then black, and I figured out the chemicals to manage it, and this fish, they grew really well, they went over a kilogram, so over two and a half pounds. And then they all died from an algae outbreak, and we couldn’t eat them. But hey, I got the idea of the fishing metaphor, so the book is built around a fishing metaphor.

We start off, we need to prepare a lure, and that’s the story. We need to spend a bit of time thinking about exactly what are the best stories in our company, and how do we find them, and what makes them powerful. And not just any story, there’s only a few really good stories, so you need to work out how to find them. And then we need to connect, we need to hook. And that’s the stories, or connection stories that get you trusted, and get your client knowing that you’re an authority and that you can help them. So those, there’s three stories there, and those are your personal story. I told a kind of a short version of my personal story about why I got into sales.

The next story is the story about other important people in your company, I call it Key Staff story. It might be the story of your CEO, or your technical sales person, or you know, that you’re using on the job. And then, most importantly, your company’s story. Why is your company in business, how did you get there, what’s the narrative? Most sales people tell facts about their company, and those facts exactly like their competitors’ facts, so your client doesn’t even listen. They don’t even hear those facts. If they even hear them at all, they push back against them. But if you tell the narrative about how your company founded, how it almost failed, what was the serendipitous moment that made your company successful, it’s very interesting.

It allows you, at the end to go, “What about your company? How did you guys get started?” and that’s the clue for connection, the clue is to tell a story that allows you to ask that question, “What about you? How did you get to your job? Why are you guys in business?” The exchange is what starts a friendship. I’m sure you’ve been doing this for more than 30 years, Marylou, and I’m sure you, like me, have friends from 30 years, which is all the customers we’ve done business with. I have friends in five industries, and we make friends by exchanging stories. Some people think that, like, selling is not really about making friendship, but I disagree. I think we do make friends if we do it right.

Marylou: You know, you’ve mentioned the concept of story sharing. I love that concept. It’s not something that I hear very often, but it makes so much sense.

Mike: Yeah, I have a test for myself when I have a first meeting. You and I are going to share this after we do this call, because your listeners I’m sure know your story, but I want to know your story more. When we do that, when we share our stories in some detail, just two or three minutes, we start that connecting process, we’re much closer to that person. Particularly, if that story some vulnerability to it. We don’t want to tell a story that’s like a superhero, that we’re a fantastic person. We want to want to let people know that we’re just like them, and then they’ll share an authentic story back.

We’re not saying my wife was eight months pregnant, and I was just lucky in my first year, which is true, that’s probably not what people would put in a personal story, but that’s what needs to be in a personal story. We need to share some vulnerability so that the client, the other person feels like sharing, they feel like telling you something about themselves.

Marylou: And it feels safe, you know? It feels like it’s okay for me to share my story, too, or maybe I had a similar experience that I would like to acknowledge yours, because I’ve had similar, so yes, I agree.

Mike: That’s right, and that’s the second requirement, if you like, for these company and personal stories. They should have a bit of variety in them. If I talk about a few different things, I’m offering the possibility for my client to key on something to go, “Oh my sister just came back from Norway, or my wife is pregnant, too.” just anything. You don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s a connector, right? And traditionally, salespeople have been talking about the photo on the client’s desk or something that sounds fake. But the most important, interesting thing in the room when two people meet each other for the first time is the two humans that don’t know each other, right? So why not tell a little about yourself, so that they’ll tell a bit about themselves, and it’s a much more authentic way to just start that connection.

Marylou: You’ve mentioned about being in the room together. A lot of my audience that’s listening in thinking, “You know, we have the phone, and we maybe have email,” because as you know I’m more top of the funnel, I’m trying to establish that rapport, and just I’m trying to get that lure and that hook started. I don’t necessarily get all the way down to creating the negotiation stories or anything like that, but I do have a limited use of the belly-to-belly togetherness where I’m at. Is this something that we can translate into the phone work that we do and email? Is it all about getting the story, at least the concept of the story, in place, and then creating different modalities to share that story or does it work better face to face?

Mike: I need to move on to the next two stories to answer that question. The reason is, we can’t tell a personal story or a company story if we’re interrupting a client in a first call, because that would be an instant hang up, right? I had to choose how to start the book, and I chose to start it from the first meeting. The reason is I’ve spent my career in working for big corporations and selling big deals. And actually, big companies don’t have the problem of getting the first meeting. Their business card gets them the meeting, if you like, right? They have the problem of getting the second meeting, to be honest. I chose to start there.

Let me tell you the next two stories, because if we’re reaching out to someone who doesn’t know us, and isn’t expecting our call, we actually need to start with half of one of the next two stories. And the next two stories are, now we’ve hooked our fish, right, so the fish is fighting on the line, so the next part of the book is called Fight. We need to fight for line share, and we need to fight to differentiate who we are compared to all the competitors, and compared to doing nothing. The two stories that help us do that are insight stories and success stories.

The insight story, insight is to find there’s something that your company knows about your clients’ business or markets that they don’t properly appreciate, but should. It’s commercial benefit for them to understand that. There are books, there are points on books written by the CEB guys called The Challenger Sale and The Challenger Customer, and those books are about challenging your clients with insight. And those books are fabulous, but there’s a little bit of a problem with the word challenge.

Challenge, we kind of take challenge to mean that I have to force a new idea onto my client, like be challenging in my approach, but that’s not really what challenge means. Challenge means the insight is challenging your clients’ understanding of their own business. If you think about it, it’s sensitive situation because you’re basically saying, “I know my business better than you, Mister Client.” but the solution is the insight story.

I’ll give you an example from the medical industry and I think your listeners will get it. There were a couple of medical researchers in Perth, in Western Australia, in the 1980s called Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. And they were working on the problem of stomach ulcers. At the time it was thought that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and that the best thing is to rest if you get stomach ulcers. What Marshall and Warren thought that, “No, stomach ulcers are caused by a particular bacteria. H. Pylori is the name of it.” And they couldn’t get their papers published, no one believed them. In fact, they believed that it’s impossible for bacteria to exist in the acidic stomach environment.

In frustration, Barry Marshall did an endoscopy on his own stomach, prepared a portion of bacteria, drank it, gave himself stomach ulcers, and then treated himself with the specific bacteria for H. Pylori, and then wrote the paper about that. You can imagine that that stunt got a lot of attention. Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2004. That’s an insight story, and the components are kind of interesting. That acts like they had an insight, but their market wasn’t ready to listen to that insight. They needed to tell a story to teach the market how to discover that insight. That’s what the insight story is, or you could call it the researcher’s story. If you know something your clients should know, can you tell the story about how you discovered it? Was it discovered in your research department, was there some Eureka moment when you actually discovered that thing? Because if you think about it, that story is now taking your client from where they are with their current understanding of their market, and teaching them the way you learnt it to know this thing.

We almost never do that, we always want to ring up and talk about facts. We want to say, you know, we discovered this thing, and here’s the discovery. But if you ring up and say, “Look, I researched it up and we’re working on this thing, and they got these amazing results and they didn’t even believe it when they first started.” They go, “Uh-huh, tell me more. What was that thing, right?” Now you’re basically telling half the story at the beginning, which is how you started, and how you were trying to find out something, and then you teach them through the turning point, to the discovery, and it’s both more natural and much more interesting to deliver your insight that way.

Marylou: I agree with that. When you started telling me the story, my inclination was to say, “How did they do that? Or what happened? Or tell me more? The tell me more.” You even said that, that is the gold standard for us. Why do we have our initial interaction with a prospect whether they’re cold, medium, warm. We’re trying to get them to respond to us and say, “Tell me more or how do you do that, or wow, I never thought of it that way!” It’s a challenge, but I don’t like that word either. That seems too adversarial to me, like you need to get a sword out.

Mike: Correct, yeah, that’s right. A lot of salespeople misunderstand. If you think of it not as, “I’m going to challenge my client, but my client is challenged by this thing.” That’s the right way to think about this. That’s the first story in the Fight phase, is the insight story. The second story is the success story. And usually when I say success story, most people think case study, and it’s not the same thing, it’s a different thing.

The classical marketing case story, and this is not to give marketing a hard time, but the marketing departments are constrained. They think like, “I can’t name my client. I need to anonymize the clients. I need to make this go on our website.” so they take all the good stuff out of the stories. The case study says this was my client’s situation, it’s a story in three parts, the case study, “This is my client’s situation, this is what we did, and this is how great it is, aren’t we wonderful?” and it’s told from this perspective of our company. The client’s success stories told from the perspective of your successful client.

I’m going to give you a self-serving example, Marylou, from my book, just to get the point across. I’ll break it down as I tell it. There’s actually six parts to the client’s success story. When I wrote Seven Stories, and I had a lady helping me structure the book, and she heard my problem is that people say they got to write a book and don’t write a book. She actually advised me not to distribute my book very widely before I went to publish, and I ignored that advice because I really wanted to know what different people think.

I had just connected with a guy who was working in Budapest, in Hungary, actually. Really interesting guy, he’s an American, David Masover, is his name, your listeners can look him up. He had worked in Silicon Valley with startups, helping companies startup, and then he got involved sales process. He’s written two books on the sales process. But he decided to move to Budapest, and couldn’t really do his normal work because he’s working with sales teams and he couldn’t speak the language. There really wasn’t the opportunity to do that kind of work in Hungary.

He pivoted and decided to use LinkedIn, and start a coaching business coaching sales people just wherever they happened to be in the world. His problem was like, “How do you do that? How do you engage with salespeople?” He got my book manuscript, and I got this very excited email from him about a week after I sent it. He said, “Mike, I’ve read your book, it’s fantastic. I’d never even thought of doing that and I’ve written two books on sales process. I have included a combination of my personal story and an insight story in my first outreach to sales people, and it’s brilliant. They tell me their story, were engaged, and it works just like you wouldn’t believe” I said, “Well, I do believe it, I wrote a book about it!”

Let me break down the six steps, because it may not be obvious. You noticed my story started with David. I told you about him, and his situation, and how he had been successful, but now had a problem. His problem was he needed to change his business. If you’re a consultant, you don’t get paid while you’re trying to figure out how to sell your new service. That is quite his problem, and then he met a guide, and the guide was me, in the form of my book, and the guide had a plan. The plan was, “These are the stories that you need.” He implemented the plan, so he avoided failure, so he avoided the failure of not being able to connect with salespeople to get his business going, and now he’s very successful. He saw the book was 100% full, he’s doing brilliantly.

Those are the six parts of the success story. You start with your successful client in their situation, you describe their situation, and then you describe the challenge, and then you describe how they met you, the guide, what the plan was that you gave them, how they avoided failure because failure is really important to actually all stories. The difference between success and failure, like how far you can stretch those apart, is how engaging your story is. That’s why some stories are really powerful because they have maybe something about possible death, or children dying, children dying might be the most powerful story we have. That even in business, the stories that have avoiding failure or those kind of thing, those are the most powerful ones.

That’s the two stories that you need when you do […]. If you’re reaching out to a new client, half of those stories are the way to reach out. If it’s a success story you decide to reach out with, then it’s going to be, we were just dealing with a client, just like you, just the other suburb, or the down the street from you guys, and they were struggling with this and this, and you’re telling them half a story, and because it’s a story that’s about a situation that they can relate to, they’re doing exactly what you said, and really they’re saying, “Tell me more, tell me more, tell me more.”

Marylou: And then the rapport starts building, and that implied trust, so you can just sense, even on the phone, the tonality of the recipient, you can sense that they’re relaxing, and then they’re opening themselves up more to say, “Okay, I am ready to have a dialogue with you, it’s okay.”

Mike: That’s right. Generally, if you’re on the phone, and it’s your job to get through a big phone list, you usually not continuing the meeting at that point. You normally say, “Look, it will be better if we meet face to face.” And then when you have that first face to face meeting, you’ll step back and go through the hooks, through the connection stories. You’ll tell your personal story, and the company’s story, and ask for their stories, because now you have the time to do it. You need to step back to the beginning because the connection stories—the hook stories—are the ones that really explains to your client that you’re an authority, that you really know what you’re talking about, and you can be trusted, and they also make you like them. There’s this sort of combination of liking, trustworthiness, and authority that’s delivered in those hook stories–in those connection stories.

The insight and the success stories are the stories that allow your client to picture a different future for themselves. The insight story opens their world up so they understand their world a little bit better. And the success story lets them almost experience the success without having to buy your products and services, they can get the benefit of it without some, without having to buy. So that’s what makes it safe for them to buy, it’s the success story.

Marylou: And the way that you’ve organized the book, correct me if I’m wrong, is the logical, emotional progression of building rapport, getting to know people, and sharing more as you get to know them more. Which is the pipeline, we’re starting at the very tippy top, we’re starting with, we may not have had a conversation, or we’re warming up a chill the conversation that might have happened six to nine months ago, if we’re digging into our lists, our house lists. And as we move along, we are starting to get to know each other better, and then the more stories unfold to the point where you said we’re taking that picture, that vision, of what life is like now for them, what life could be, which is that challenge insight section, and then we move from there to more proof and specificity around, “Here’s how we can help you. Here’s how others have come along the path, that the success path, from where they worked to where they are now, and this is how we’re going to take your hand and take you the rest of the way with us to accomplish the same thing, or even go beyond where you think possible right now.”

Mike: Yeah, it’d be exactly right. Now, for completeness, because I know your listeners are going to be going, “Okay, Mike’s told five stories, and the damn book says seven.”

Marylou: Yes, I have a very operational market.

Mike: What are the last two stories, right? The final part of the book is called Landing the Deal. We have to land the fish, right? And the two stories there are stories that seek to solve the problem of risk. Because you’ve opened your client’s mind, they now can accept there’s a new way of thinking, and it seems safe because others have done it, if you have a success story. If you don’t have a success story, by the way, by definition you’re a start-up, and that’s a much, much harder sales situation.

For me, the definition of business development, true business development is, “I don’t have a success story. I don’t have a relevant success story. I only have insight.” and I’ve spent a lot of my career in that situation, it’s much more difficult, and there’s quite a lot in the Seven Stories book about how to sell when you only have insight.

We still need to get the deal signed, we still need to sign the contract, and when people have to sign a contract, what typically happens, even if it’s not such a big deal, is other people get involved in the decision. People who have veto power,  what happens if it doesn’t work? Will this company stand by you? Shouldn’t we spend our money on that other project, isn’t that more important? You get conflicts of resources, and the two stories that help you get through the Land stage are value stories and teaching stories.

The value stories are stories that explain how your company will behave after they’ve signed the deal. And I’ll give you an example from my experience. I worked for the big German multinational company Siemens, so $100,000 billion revenue company. They’re in all kinds of, they’re an engineering company, they’re in all kinds of engineering. And I happened to be in the CEO’s office, and I heard half of a telephone conversation, which sounded serious. And he hung the phone up, and he said, “Mike, that was the Victorian government.” We’re in the State of Victoria in Australia. Siemens was delivering an electrical cable that connects Tasmania, where I grew up actually, I grew up in Tasmania, it’s an island in the south of Australia.

We’re building this 400-km cable under the sea to Tasmania from Victoria, and Siemens was building the big transformers that transform the electrical current at each end. And the ship that was bringing the transformers from Germany to Australia hit a storm in the southern ocean and broke its rudder and smashed all six of the transformers beyond repair. It was 18 months to build them. Siemens was on the television as the company that was now going to delay this piece of critical infrastructure.

Albert, the CEO, told me that the Siemens board fast tracked, they didn’t go into litigation mode, like, you know, how are we going to sue this ship owner or all that, they just started building new transformers. And they built them in record time, and in fact, the cable was commissioned on time. That’s a value story, right, that’s a story that explains what it’s like to work with this company. And that kind of story is more powerful than you can believe. People would pay double the odds, they’ll pay double, to be sure something’s going to be delivered when you’re working on that kind of project.

Maybe you don’t tell that story, maybe your sponsor won’t tell that story in a stakeholder meeting, but if they’ve heard that story, their tone of voice will persuade. They will be personally convinced that they’re dealing with a company that will deliver. That’s an example. Now, your company might not have those kind of values.

The hospitality industry for example, they like this sort of lost-wallet story, or the lost-passport story, where you know, the bellboy drove across town to give their guest back their passport at the airport without asking for any reward because honesty is one of the values of the company. You got to work out what the values of your company really are, and then find these kinds of stories to be able to tell, which really do help you get the deal closed.

The final one, which I won’t give an example of because I know the time is short, but I call it the sales manager story, or the sales teaching story. That’s the story that helps around problems like a difficult person in the stakeholder meeting, someone who’s really being difficult to persuade or a company that doesn’t understand the cost of delay. So the stories that help get you past a block in the decision process in those meetings that the client has, you’re not even there. In fact, the story is the only that you can place into those stakeholder meetings that will do work when you’re not there. If you think about it, stories can do work when you’re not there, it’s an amazing thing, the power of stories to persuade people, it can work on remote control.

Marylou: It can, and when you remember them. That’s the beauty of it, too, you remember stories, like you said, more so than facts and figures.

Mike: Yeah, and there’s a reason, and the reason is that the big part of our minds, most people when they pick up a book on storytelling, there’s be a sort of a mandatory chapter on, I call it pop psychology, where I talk about […] and fear and all that kind of thing. But that’s not the reason that stories are compelling. If you hold your two fists together in front of you, make two fists, that’s about the size of the biggest part of your brain, which is the neocortex, that wrinkly part on the outside. So that 80%, 75% of your brain is that.

It’s all wrinkled like that because it’s actually a sheet of cellular material, cellular tissue, it’s about 3mm thick, and if you laid it out flat, if you unwrinkled it, it would be about the size of a tea towel or a dinner napkin, about that thick as well, and it’s all bunched up like that so it can fit inside your skull, and it has an incredible number of connections coming from all of your senses, but including your internal body sense–your feeling of arousal, and your heartbeat, and all of that sort of our body sense. People don’t know we have eight senses, not five.

What the neocortex is doing is it’s a prediction engine. What it does is it memorizes patterns in the environment, both the external environment and your internal body environment, how you feel, and it tries to predict what’s going to happen next. It’s continually doing that, it’s predicting on short, medium, and long term. When I’m saying some words, you’re trying to predict what I’m going to say next. Your brain actually put the word ‘next’ in your mind for you, you just said, “Mike’s going to say next.” It doesn’t just predict what you’re going to say next, it predicts what you’re going to see, it predicts how you’re going to feel, and you predict how the other person is going to feel. That’s what your cortex does, the neocortex is a memory-prediction organ.

It can only predict things that have repeatable sequences. If there’s no repeatable sequence, it can’t predict it. You can’t learn how to speak, or how to see, or how to learn if there aren’t patterns that repeat. You start to recognize what those things are, and you start to predict what they’re going to happen. Eventually, actually, most of what we say, and most of what we hear is only the prediction. When we’re dreaming and we’re planning, we’re thinking, we’re just predicting. We’re not using our senses at all. And stories are, by definition, high-level sequences that you can’t predict, so pay attention. The reason that stories work is that we know from childhood that stories are unpredictable and something’s going to happen next that we have to pay attention to.

Marylou: That’s right, exactly. Well, this has been a wonderful discussion, Mike, thank you so much for spending time. For the audience, the book is Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell. It’s about establishing rapport and trust. We talked about differentiating, presenting challenging insights, unsticking negotiations with difficult people or difficult portions of the pipeline that we’re struggling, and to create better business outcomes for us no matter where we are at the pipeline. Whether we’re trying to generate opportunities, or whether we’re actually closing business, or even opening up the conversation.

Mike, how can we reach you to learn more about the book, if there’s any other teachings you have, where do we find you?

Mike: You get your Google app, and type in Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell, and you’ll find me. It’s very easy.

Marylou: You have an Amazon.com, they’ll definitely find it.

Mike: You’ll find YouTube channel with some videos, and some video stories, and the book. You’ll find a website for the book, as well. It’s all very easily found.

Marylou: Wonderful. Well, great. Well again, thank you so much for your time, and I will make sure all these links are on there for those folks who are driving around thinking, “Yeah, I can’t write this down.” I will make sure everything’s out there, and again, very much appreciate your time. I can’t wait to put some of these to work with some of my clients. I think it’s going to be a great way. That insight is the holy grail for us to get started, for sure.

Mike: I’m just finishing up the audible version of the book, too. One of the fabulous things about writing a book is to meet some of my business heroes. Mike Bosworth, the author of Solution Selling, wrote me. He wrote the foreword for Seven Stories. Also, fabulously, he has narrated his foreword for the audio book, and I’ve just got it back from him, which is fantastic.

Marylou: Oh, that’s wonderful, yeah, that’s great. Well, be sure to socialize with us here in the States, and once this podcast gets posted, I’ll make sure everybody here got it, because this here’s for us, everyone who’s struggling with trying to get conversations started, struggling to keep that conversation going to get to the next step, stories are a wonderful way to do that. What Mike is doing for us is giving us the ability and the permission to go through a process in order to get those stories out of us and into the world to share with our clients and prospects. Thanks again, Mike.

Mike: That’s it, thanks to you, Marylou. Yeah, you need to engineer some […].

Marylou: Indeed, always, always.

Mike: Lovely to chat, thanks Marylou.