What is a Consultative Evangelist? That’s how today’s guest refers to himself. Listen in to hear him discuss his role and learn how his consultative approach is supported. In today’s episode, Simeon discusses how someone in his role advances people in the pipeline, whether Simeon’s approach has changed, and how he defines the term “trusted advisor”.
Episode Highlights:
- Simeon’s experiences as a Consultative Evangelist
- What Simeon’s role means as far as advancing people into the pipeline
- A typical flow that works now in the pre-prep stage
- Whether Simeon’s approach has changed in terms of the corporate hierarchy
- How to transition to a trusted advisor sale
- How “trusted advisor” is defined
- Practicing the skill of being a consultant or trusted advisor
Resources:
Transcript
Marylou: I think it’d be very helpful to understand a couple of things. One, is your consultative approach supported by data and metrics? Meaning, your actions and your conversations, do you try to find intent and insights first as you prepare these conversations to become more consultative, and/or is it a combination of asking a question, hearing the answer, and then building the conversation from there? Which really requires a lot of experience in order to know how to navigate that.
I would love for you to talk about, first of all, your experiences working as a consultative evangelist, as you call it, and what that means in terms of advancing people into the pipeline?
Simeon: It’s very easy as a salesperson, I think, to fall into the trap of wanting to be the expert in the room. I think it’s natural. I think when you go to a client, you want to seem like you’re the expert, and obviously, what are you an expert in? You’re an expert in your products and services. What happens then is you tend to dominate the conversation with your products and services.
The problem with that is then you don’t really get to the core of what the challenges are for your clients and really understand initially whether you are a good fit for them, and if you are a good fit, how you are a good fit for them? I definitely think that doing research in the first element is crucial, and actually understanding before you go into a meeting who are you speaking to, what markets are they operating in, and how you can help.
I actually think quite a lot of this comes even before you reach out to a client. I think a lot of it comes when you first start in a new company, in the onboarding process from the management perspective. My experience with sales teams generally is that the onboarding for a sales rep would be very much focused on your product, your company, your service, what you do, et cetera, rather than actually learning as much as you could about the customers you’re selling to and their market. I think someone agrees with me.
I definitely think that the first piece is almost like an enablement piece when sales reps first join a company is actually, during that onboarding process, making sure that there is enough time allocated to learning about who you’re actually selling to, what kind of challenges they’re facing, as well as learning about your products and services. I think that’s the first thing.
The second thing is we were saying is coming to those meetings prepared. But that’s not always easy, particularly if you’re an SDR and you’re targeted with a thousand calls a day. How would you possibly do enough research into one client to justify a good conversation? I think tools like SimilarWeb do help with that. We have what’s called insights generated, which actually provides insights to you. With a click of a button, you can find an interesting insight which you can then put into an email […]. There are definitely ways around that.
But then to your point, absolutely. When you’re face-to-face with the client, whether that’s obviously on Zoom these days or whether you’re going into speaking to a client or speaking on the phone, it’s very, very important that I would almost spend (if you can) 90% of the time listening to what the clients say and 10% of the time talking (if you can).
Almost challenge yourself to—the next meeting that you have—try and speak a little bit less or try and ask more relevant questions. Because that’s really where you can start to learn about your clients. A lot of the time, you will find your clients are very happy to talk about what they do. They will appreciate the fact you’re taking an interest in what they’re doing. That you’re not just babbling about your products and services.
It’s not just a case of asking any old question. It’s about asking the right question, of course, but I think it’s about spending a lot less time talking yourself and actually letting your clients give you all the information.
Then what you’ll find is that there’ll be common threads between certain clients you’re speaking to. You won’t always necessarily have to do as much in-depth research in similar clients because there’ll be common threads that you can take into meetings, and then actually can speak more on a peer-to-peer level about, well, actually, I was speaking with client X. He’s in a similar market with similar challenges, and this is what they’re doing and this is how we’re helping. So you’re speaking a far more kind of peer-to-peer level. I think it definitely runs across those three areas.
Marylou: It’s interesting that you said that about the thousand calls a day from an SDR perspective. It is virtually impossible for them to—especially if they’re following a model that is transactional-based, they’re trying to reach as many people as possible. They don’t really know who they’re going to get in touch with. Especially some of the tools here in the states that we still use where we dial, dial, dial, dial, dial until we get a body. If we didn’t feed our sequence or cadence with like people and we end up with a customer experience person on one call and then an IT person on the next call, it’s hard to switch gears that quickly.
Tell me a bit about this research part because back in the day—that’s when I was in selling, which was 100 years ago practically now—we definitely did a lot of research upfront. Even though we were the evangelists of the product because there was no internet when I was selling, we were the people that they came to for information. We were the folks that had the in-depth knowledge of the products, the industry, the competition, so there was more of an implied trust there. But we still did a lot of research upfront.
I spent many nights in the library because we didn’t have the internet to do some research on particular clients I was chasing or particular roles and what their workflows look like. I did spend a lot of time researching, and it was probably—for me, personally—hours of research for particularly one client depending on how big they were, the cost of the average deal size, et cetera. What is the typical flow that you think works nowadays with the internet with tools about how much time do people need to spend in that pre-prep stage before they actually start a conversation?
Simeon: Thankfully now, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you with that—SimilarWeb definitely being one of them—whereby you have this incredible market intelligence data […] what’s going on on every website in the world. How much traffic they’re getting, where that traffic is coming from, or what do you think the traffic is like online, customers, I suppose, going into a virtual store. What the kind of engagement levels are like, contact details, and all that sort of stuff.
You can actually get a lot of that within one platform like SimilarWeb, for example. You can actually utilize that from an SDR perspective, if you’re responsible for generating leads, you can actually utilize tools like SimilarWeb to filter and find companies that meet that ideal customer profile. That will take some of the research out of it because for example, your search could be I want companies that are headquartered in the US that are receiving customers from countries XYZ that have seen the 20% growth year over year in the number of customers, et cetera.
So you can really actually filter down, and so you’ll actually know a lot more about your customers ahead of time than you would have done before versus going on Google and finding top 100 ecommerce companies. You will just get a list of names, then you will have to do your research because there’s no context behind it. Actually utilizing market intelligence data to get those insights beforehand is crucial. Then from there, you can utilize that data in your consultative selling approach.
I would say it depends on obviously who you’re selling to and the market, but I think particularly for online businesses, you can definitely use tools like Similar to take a lot of that time out. Like I was saying before, what we have is insights generated which essentially pushes insights to you around what’s going on with your client, how are they benchmarking against their competitors in certain markets where the opportunities, potential, and gaps are in their strategy. You can actually get that in a couple of clicks of a button. Thankfully, it’s somewhat easier.
Marylou: Than me with my coffee pot at the library, right?
Simeon: I think there’s always going to be a little bit of an element of that, but hopefully, a lot of that legwork will be taken.
Marylou: Yeah, that’s great. Tell me about the top of the funnel then in terms of consultative selling. What is an approach that you feel really works well now? We do have a lot of tools. There’s a lot of stack that we could put on top of whatever we’re using for follow-up. But at the end of the day, there’s a conversation in there that has to happen.
I’m curious as to your approach, what’s working, and if you could share some conversion rates like if you talk to a hundred people, how many of those actually start moving and advancing on average? If you have numbers like that, I’d be really curious. And also, lastly, has COVID affected any of this methodology of yours or has it only enhanced it?
Simeon: For us as a business that tracks online businesses, COVID has obviously greatly accelerated things because bricks and mortar stores closed, more online businesses opened, and even as bricks and mortars’ doors are opening now, we’re still seeing a huge influx of new online businesses opening every day. I think businesses and consumers are definitely adapted in that respect. The online ecommerce market is showing no signs of slowing down at all.
I think that in terms of an approach, I would be always thinking about the customer and having a customer-centric approach, so thinking about what’s important for them. Ultimately, you want to tie that into the solution that you have and the product that you have, but I think really getting into the mindset of the client is really important.
I’ll give an example. So we work, as I said, at the beginning of the piece with a lot of logistics companies. There’s one very global business everyone would have heard of. They actually came to us a few years ago and said that we want to transform from being just another service provider to being a strategic partner to our clients, both at top and bottom of funnel. So once they eventually converted clients to being a genuine account manager in terms of being a strategic partner, but also at top of funnel winning new business.
They’re using our data to actually talk to their clients about things that are completely outside of normal logistics business. Trends within certain markets from an online perspective, what kind of keywords are driving traffic to their competitors, things that would be very much outside the remit of a general sales conversation, but very much at the heart of helping to grow their client’s businesses, so it’s obviously a huge interest and a massive differentiator between themselves and competitors.
Now logistics, as a lot of industries are very competitive and very commoditized, it can be very difficult to differentiate yourself from a competitor. But generally, what will happen is that you’ll start talking about what you do and then your prospect will kind of drive you straight into a conversation around price, and then you’ll happen to undercut very quickly.
For example, if you went into a conversation and said, hi, I’m calling from company X. We offer the widest range of this. We’re the fastest and most reliable. Prospect will think, well, I’ve heard this pitch 100 times already today. Let’s just get straight to a conversation about the price.
Whereas actually, what a lot of our clients are doing very successfully is they’ll open a conversation with, did you know that X, Y, and Z is happening in your market? I can see two of your competitors are accelerating in this area. This is what’s working well for them. This is what we do and how we can help. We have a conversation that just completely transforms how you’re communicating with your clients and very much puts them at the forefront of everything that you’re doing.
I would say, to your question, thinking about genuinely what is important for your client. What are the key challenges? You might need to ask them that obviously in the conversation you have with them, but really trying to get to the crux of that before you start talking about your own products and solutions. Unfortunately, I don’t actually have any stats on me on that. But there are plenty out there to talk about how our consultative approach will help with conversions.
I was reading one of the reports from Salesforce recently saying that about 78% of B2B buyers are now looking for a trusted advisor rather than just another salesperson. Sports I think or other companies are talking about how sales are really now rapidly and moving a lot more to be kind of data-driven. This is definitely the kind of motion that companies need to move into to really get ahead of the game because if you’re just stuck in your ways of talking about your products and solutions, unfortunately, your competitors are going to be taking a different angle and probably going to be a lot more successful in it than you are.
Marylou: Does this also mean that when you become this trusted advisor, I want to get into that term because it’s so scary for so many people to know what the heck that really means, and can you quantify it or is it behavioral-based? But I’ll set that aside.
The question I have is because you are consultative because you are approaching the conversation as a trusted advisor, are you naturally finding that you’re going up the hierarchy in the company and talking to more directors, C suite, VP level? Because a lot of times, even now with the SDR role, they’re finding themselves way too far out in that circle of influence. They’re way at the tip of the edge that are people that are going to maybe be project owners, but they don’t have the big strategic picture in mind. They have their little piece of the pie and all they want to know is can I get my stuff done?
So tell me about that. Has that actually changed your approach in terms of the corporate hierarchy and approaching people?
Simeon: Massively. So I’d say from a top of funnel perspective, what you’re enabling yourself to do is multithread very effectively and speak to a broader range of people. Going back to the logistics example again, initially, when we speak to logistics companies, they’re quite wary about why do I need to be speaking about keywords, website traffic, and things like that? Because these aren’t the people that I’m generally speaking to. I’m speaking to slightly more technical shipping people.
Actually, what they’re doing is that they’re then speaking to this person, but then that conversation is generating or opening a door to another department and another department and another department so then the opportunity grows. That’s definitely effective from a top of funnel perspective.
Then from an account management retention upsell perspective, what you said is absolutely spot on in terms of moving up the chain, speaking to more senior people because if you’re offering strategic guidance in terms of how they can grow their business, companies are going to want to invite you into meetings. We are seeing this happen. Account managers are getting invited into more and more meetings to talk about these kinds of strategic processes and how they can grow their business.
Then ultimately, what will happen is you get to that gold standard for any company, which is where your customers become your advocates. They’re then promoting me to their network, which is ultimately where every business wants to get to. Without a shadow of a doubt, it really does move you up that food chain very effectively.
Marylou: To that end, another objection I hear a lot of concern is, well, I don’t have the industry experience or I don’t have the tenure to have these conversations. I always push back on that because I think if you have this insatiable curiosity to understand what makes them tick in their business, plus if you love your craft, and you’re a student of the business side of what makes things better with your product and how that’s applied strategically to the growth of your client’s business, it doesn’t matter if you’ve been in sales for five years or 50 years.
You should be able to have a conversation at least at a certain level and then and only then when they say, you know what, this is something that I think would be super important. I want to bring some of my folks in. Then you easily segue to, great, I’m going to now introduce you to my people because they’re going to get down into bits and bytes of how all this works. That bottle still is okay, but I think a lot of people are just not comfortable with the fact or they think you have to have an account executive, an associate account executive, or someone that’s a little bit higher up in the sales knowledge in order to transition to a trusted advisor sale. What do you think about that?
Simeon: I think it goes back to what we were saying at the start of the piece where, as a salesperson, you do want to be the expert in the room, and it’s only natural. You want to be comfortable with what you’re talking about and coming out of your comfort zone makes you feel vulnerable, and that’s completely understandable. But I think what you said there is absolutely right. Actually, in my experience, showing a bit of vulnerability actually goes a long way. It shows quite a lot of genuineness, I think.
Marylou: Yeah, definitely.
Simeon: You have to be open and actually going into things that you’re not necessarily an expert in, and being honest and just saying, look, I’m not necessarily an expert in this field, obviously you are, but this is the data to show X, Y, and Z. You’re not presenting yourself as knowing all the answers. You’re just going by what the data says. You can kind of hide behind that a little bit.
I definitely think showing—and this probably goes into another topic—a bit of vulnerability in a meeting is actually perfectly okay and maybe even encouraged as well. […] show that you’re underprepared or whatever, it just shows that actually, in this particular topic, I’m not an expert. What do you think of this? Can you elaborate a little bit more?
I think actually, what it does as well, my experience has been with other sales reps makes your role a lot more enjoyable rather than just talking about what you do day after day, week after week to different people. Actually diving into different areas and talking about different things, different markets, different trends, and actually thinking of yourself as a consultant is fun. It just adds a bit more variety to your role, I think, as well as (I would say) elevating and generally making you a better salesperson.
Marylou: Absolutely. At the end of the day, if we’re selling products, it’s a given that we love our product, right? Now we need to figure out ways we can apply the differentiated claims of our product to the business models of these clients that we’re servicing to figure out if we’re a good fit or not. Because that’s another thing you mentioned at the top, are we a good fit?
The only way you can determine whether we’re a good fit or not is to dive into more of the day-to-day workflow life, what their goals are, what their future is, what they see as an upward path for them, whether it’s in their job role or in the company strategically, how that looks. We get into all those types of questions that have absolutely nothing to do necessarily with the product feature or the benefit of the product and everything to do with the person.
The consultative role includes the person, and I think that’s the main thing that we’ve lost sight of, especially with all these tools, all these things, and all these emails that I still get to this day—our product is this, isn’t our product great? It’s like, no, it’s not great. How is this helping me? Why should I care? What does it do for me that I should stop what I’m doing and listen to what you have to say?
I think that gets into that area of trusted advisor. I mean, that term is so difficult to get your arms around, and so I’m curious from your perspective, knowing that you specialize in ecommerce and ecommerce companies, what does that mean—trusted advisor—to your people? How do they define trusted advisor?
Simeon: They would define that as someone that is, as we said earlier on the piece, having a customer-centric approach, putting the customer at the center of what they’re doing, and just take it very literally. You are advising them on certain areas of their business. You broaden the conversation from just what your product does to actually why they might potentially need it and then how that will help them long term.
I think what you were saying is really important about the product fit. I think that particularly, for businesses like SimilarWeb that works on a renewal basis, so it’s not a case of making one-off sales and then that’s fine, […] speak to the customer again. If you’re working on a retention basis, you’re only going to get bitten down the line if you’re selling something that isn’t a good product fit. You’re going to have unhappy customers, you’re going to get a bad reputation, and you’re going to have a high churn rate.
Now, obviously, there are issues in terms of commissions and things like salespeople are targeted on the sales they make. Why should they necessarily care about whether it’s a good product fit? That’s the account manager’s job. Or maybe there’s something that needs to be looked there in terms of commission structures and how salespeople are recognized, but it’s definitely an important part of it.
What you were saying about consultative selling being about the person, it’s all about the person. So to change lanes a little bit and talk a bit about behavioral psychology, I find this really interesting. The webinar with a company called […] last year who were kind of experts in this field. They were talking about the fact that as human beings, we have two sides of our brain. We have the system one brain and the system two brain.
The system one brain is like the dominant force. It’s the one that we’ve evolved over millions of years. It’s the caveman-type brain, which is very reactive. It’s very effective when you’re running away from saber-toothed tigers and having to hunt your food, but not particularly geared for 21st century living. And then you have your system two brain, which is kind of the more 21st century living brain, but it’s the much smaller part of the brain and it evolved a lot later than the system one brain.
The way that it kind of boils down to sales is that particularly when you’re selling an expensive product or you’re selling a product that requires a long term commitment, it basically requires your clients to be really having to think about it properly before they make a decision. Generally, B2B decisions take six or seven decision-makers anyway, so it’s going to have to go to different people anyway.
But when you’re engaging that side of things, you really need to be talking to the system two part of the brain because the system one brain is very reactive. It makes very quick decisions. So if you’re trying to sell a four-year contract or something, you can’t be speaking to the part of the brain that’s only designed to make very quick, very snap decisions because that’s when they will just drag you into a conversation around price. […] cheapest, right, let’s go.
Whereas the system two brain is the one that’s a lot more rational, it thinks more, and it is more calculated. The only way that you can really engage that side of the brain is through consultative selling approach, by engaging them more. If you were just talking about your products and services, that’s going to be engaging system one brain. If you’re speaking on a more consultative basis, that’s engaging system two brain, and that’s why it’s an effective approach particularly for expensive products and products that require a long term commitment is that you’re speaking for more rational side of the brain, which is essentially what consultative selling is doing.
There’s definitely a method behind just this term consultative, I think it gets thrown around a lot, and it is definitely important, but that’s certainly one of the theories behind actually why it’s so important.
Marylou: And that’s a good delineation, I think, because the term trusted advisor is a term that’s so vague. I’m a process person, systems person, so I’m always trying to get things into a repeatable, consistent type of process.
If there is a fork in the road with system one-system two and system two is a series of behaviors, a series of experiences that you can weave into your talk track for selling, then I think practice will get you to a point where, like you said, they’re going to be clients that are like-minded that are in similar industries that you can reuse and repurpose your talk tracks, your sales conversations. But the original build of it all does take some time, takes finessing, takes practice, and you’re going to fall on your face. Put your ego in your pocket because you’re going to just need to talk to the next guy about this to improve.
Like you said, have fun with it. You aren’t going to be the expert. I’m not an expert. I flub all the time with things, but it’s like, I’m here to learn too. If we’re not learning, then we should be retired, I guess. We shouldn’t be still in this industry because it changes a lot and you’re always learning something new from your clients and prospects, so you have to look at it that way.
Simeon: It’s absolutely a skill. Being consultative and being a trusted advisor is definitely a skill. Like with any skill, it takes practice. Make a game out of it. Make a competition with yourself about I’m going to step into my next meeting. I’m genuinely from a consultancy firm, I’m coming in as a consultant. What is the kind of mindset, what are the processes that a consultant would have?
Obviously, they’re going to ask lots of questions, the why questions. They’re going to really need to dive into what this business is all about, what the problems are, what the opportunities are because otherwise, they can’t do their job. So really go in and pretend you are a consultant really. You are, you can be, essentially. Like we said before, just challenge yourself to the next meeting, I’m going to ask two more questions or three more questions. Keep pushing yourself. I’m going to speak a little bit less. I’m going to speak a little bit less. Push yourself.
Marylou: Like we say, smaller improvements. Just micro improvements over time mean massive results.
Simeon: Yeah, and I do think what you were saying before about it being a behavioral skill, it is. I think that there’s definitely a value in recognizing that from the sales management perspective. With things like commissions, it can be very much tied to quarterly numbers. Ultimately, you need to hit your numbers, and that’s the be-all and end-all. I completely understand that. But the problem is, if as a salesperson the only thing you’re worried about is your quarterly numbers, you’re kind of chasing your tail a lot of the time. You’re not able to really think that far ahead.
These are behavioral skills that will, in the long term, have a massive impact. You might not see that immediately because it might even prolong the sales cycle a little bit because you’re elevating conversations for different teams and having bigger conversations, so the sale itself might be bigger, but it might prolong the sales cycle because it’s going to be a more meaningful relationship you have.
From where I’ve seen it being really effective is when salespeople promote it to do that, whether it’s through monetary or just recognition, as well as this is your quarterly target, this is how much […] get the money you bring in. I actually want to see from the proposals that you’re sending or the conversations you’re having you exhibiting behavior X, Y, and Z. Asking these questions, being more consultative, taking this approach, and actually rewarding salespeople that way because that will encourage them to do it more, and then long term, I think that will then have benefits in terms of how much revenue you’re bringing in.
Marylou: I agree. In fact, one of my clients in Denmark, the CCO there, she’s amazing. She put together what she’s calling a maturity index. It’s rated on eight different areas of sales maturity, and some of that is how engaging you are with the client. How often you’re having a dialogue with them about certain topics. Whether you bring them together for business reviews, things like that. So it’s definitely looking towards the skill aspect and not really concerned about did you close this business in Q1 or Q2? She’s been incorporating that slowly over time.
What’s happening with that company is the enablement side of life is not just training, it’s training and then coaching. The coaching piece is what is elevating all of our reps into trusted advisors really. It’s getting to that point. They stay longer, they’re happier, and they’re branching out and making recommendations.
We have different levels of maturity just like Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that, but it starts with a newcomer and it ends with an expert. The newcomer is someone coming straight in from maybe out of college or second job and sales, and then the expert is actually challenging the products that we deliver, the delivery mechanisms, whether or not we should have additional feature sets. I mean, they get into the weeds with the product growth and product alignment because they know the businesses so well of their clients. It’s super exciting.
I haven’t seen that here in the States, but she’s from Europe. I think there’s a little bit more emphasis on the quality—I’m sure I’m going to put my foot in my mouth here—of the sale in Europe than here. It’s more like get the deal in and we’ll worry about it later.
I would like to end this by giving people an idea of SimilarWeb up there. We’re on video. It’s the first time. This is kind of weird, but I’m excited about that. How can they get a hold of us, Simeon, and where should they start if they want to go down this path of leveraging metrics, leveraging this trusted advisor, or behavioral, where would you point people to start?
Simeon: People can simply reach out to me directly. Happy to have […] conversations. Go to similarweb.com, obviously to get more […]. Definitely happy to speak directly.
Marylou: Okay, very good. Very much appreciate your time. Sorry, your earbuds ran out. I will make sure that on the webpage that we’re putting together for you, we’ll have all the contact information for you. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye now.