New strategies to attract more customers

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In a captivating presentation, the importance of aligning sales strategies with human psychology is unpacked. The session emphasizes understanding the neuroscience behind decision-making to craft effective sales pitches and proposals. Key points include focusing on primacy and recency, leveraging emotional differentiation, and making adjustments in traditional selling methods to better align with clients' unconscious motivations.

Highlights

Sales presentations should begin strong and end strong to capitalize on the brain's focus on primacy and recency. 🤝
Differentiation at an emotional level (tribal, simplicity, fear) is more effective than logical differentiation. ❤️
The importance of anchoring differentiation in industry or workload specialization cannot be overstated. 📚
Digital engagement should align selling methods with the neuroscience of decision-making. 🔍
A simple, structured alignment email after discovery meetings can significantly boost client engagement. 📧
Present proposals live rather than emailing—ensure the message resonates and addresses client needs effectively. 🎤

Key Takeaways

Always pay attention to the beginning and ending of your presentations—first impressions last and the ending reinforces your message! 🎬
Understanding the brain’s decision-making shortcuts can transform how you sell and interact with customers. 🧠
Emotional and logical differentiation are not created equal—emotional connections win over hearts and minds! ❤️🧠
The alignment email captures both the negative and positive aspects of the client's situation to create a compelling proposal. 📧
Avoid emailing proposals; present them instead to engage your client actively. The brain rewards simplicity! 📊
Capitalize on fear and desire—fear is three times more motivating in decision-making. 😱💡

Overview

The presentation by Mark explores how leveraging neuroscience can significantly enhance sales strategies. Initial impressions and final statements are crucial, as the brain is hardwired to pay more attention to these points. By understanding this, sales professionals can craft presentations that captivate from start to finish, ensuring their message sticks. The emphasis is on making an indelible first impression and leaving them wanting more at the end.

Differentiation plays a critical role in effective selling. Mark stresses that logical reasons for differentiation, like price and product features, are often less effective than emotional connections, such as industry expertise and understanding client-specific challenges. Sellers are encouraged to become members of the client's 'tribe' or community, which fosters trust and alignment. Emotional triggers such as fear and desire can drive decision-making far more effectively than logical arguments.

Finally, the session underscores the power of structured communication. The use of alignment emails following discovery calls helps reinforce understanding between the seller and client, aligning goals and expectations clearly. Additionally, presenting proposals in live meetings rather than emailing them allows sellers to engage directly with clients, address concerns in real-time, and ultimately guide decisions more effectively.

Chapters

00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Opening Remarks The chapter titled 'Introduction and Opening Remarks' begins with a speaker named Mark coming up to address the audience. The transcript suggests that Mark makes casual remarks, possibly to ease into the topic. He uses filler words ('blah blah blah') and welcomes everyone to the event. Mark briefly mentions an interesting concept regarding 'credentialing ourselves,' hinting at a potential theme for the discussion.
01:00 - 04:00: Importance of First Impressions in Sales The chapter titled 'Importance of First Impressions in Sales' explores the critical role that initial impressions play in the context of sales presentations. It begins with a reflection on how common it is for sales presentations to start with a focus on the presenter and their company, highlighting a common scenario where audience engagement is superficial at best. The speaker questions the audience's honesty, humorously calling out those who deny following this pattern. The key focus then shifts to the immediate formation of opinions by the audience, emphasizing that the value of what is shared needs to be established quickly. This sets the stage for discussing strategies to make impactful first impressions that capture the audience's attention and convey value right from the start.
04:00 - 07:00: Company Credentials and Selling Methodologies This chapter explores the psychology behind attention span and first impressions, particularly in a business context. It discusses how our brains are naturally inclined to focus intently at the beginning of interactions, which influences our judgment about whether to further engage or invest energy. This concept is linked to selling methodologies and the importance of first impressions in business communications.
07:00 - 13:00: Understanding Neuroscience in Sales The chapter titled 'Understanding Neuroscience in Sales' explores the strategic integration of neuroscience in sales processes within the high-tech industry. The narrative begins by acknowledging the challenge of effectively introducing the company, which specializes in the Microsoft ecosystem. With a global reach, their expertise lies in collaborating with partners and Microsoft itself. Central to the chapter is the development of selling methodologies for cloud solutions, emphasizing tailored strategies to enhance sales performance through a deep understanding of neuroscience principles.
13:00 - 17:00: Decision Making and Cognitive Biases The chapter focuses on decision-making processes and cognitive biases. It emphasizes Microsoft's approach to acquiring customers, noting this as a key differentiator. The approach combines offer development, market strategy, digital engagement, marketing capabilities, and effective selling. The chapter encourages understanding and learning from this comprehensive approach to enhance selling effectiveness.
17:00 - 22:00: Sales Process and Differentiation This chapter discusses the sales process and differentiation, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer needs and tailoring the approach accordingly. The speaker shares personal experiences from 20 years of global sales, highlighting the ineffectiveness of generic methodologies and the value of neuroscience in sales.
22:00 - 27:00: Importance of Documentation and Repeatable Sales Processes The chapter emphasizes the importance of understanding the buyer's mindset to improve sales strategies. It suggests adapting what you sell, how you sell, and who you sell to based on insights into customer thinking. It also highlights the quick judgments prospects make on whether engaging with a sales presentation is valuable, suggesting the need for effective presentation techniques to maintain interest and avoid distractions. This underscores the importance of documentation and repeatable sales processes for consistent and effective sales efforts.
27:00 - 35:00: Questioning Techniques and Sequence The chapter titled 'Questioning Techniques and Sequence' delves into the role of heuristic learning in customer interactions during sales encounters. It underscores how the brain is naturally wired to operate and respond in these scenarios. The speaker aims to elucidate this concept by exploring elements of brain science as they apply to every sales cycle, over the next 30 to 35 minutes. The speaker also engages the audience by questioning who is responsible for generating revenue, implying that everyone should be involved or aware in some way.
35:00 - 41:00: Differentiation and Emotional Impact In this chapter titled 'Differentiation and Emotional Impact', the focus is on understanding the psychological processes involved in a consumer's buying journey. The discussion emphasizes translating psychological insights into practical applications within a sales cycle, specifically tailored for those who sell and implement technology solutions and manage services. The chapter aims to provide a concise yet impactful framework to make these strategies repeatable and effective.
41:00 - 51:00: Key Sales Skills and Proposal Techniques The chapter discusses the brain's decision-making process in the context of selecting a managed service provider or software solution. It highlights the brain's inefficiency, consuming a significant amount of the body's energy, and its tendency to conserve energy by seeking shortcuts during decision-making.
51:00 - 62:00: Q&A and Closing Remarks The chapter titled 'Q&A and Closing Remarks' discusses how stereotypes function as mental shortcuts. The speaker gives an example where they are pre-judged based on being from Vancouver, illustrating how such assumptions arise from past experiences or feelings of envy, such as towards Vancouver’s weather or hockey team.

New strategies to attract more customers Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 come on up mark all yours there you go blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah welcome everybody um you know the interesting thing about credentialing ourselves
00:30 - 01:00 at the start of a presentation is that nobody listens how many of you here have some form of sales presentation right that starts with you and your company show of hands the rest of you are liars right yeah so here's the thing you know once i come up and i start to talk how long does it really take for you to form an opinion that what i have to share has value
01:00 - 01:30 yeah one minute that's very gracious yeah sometimes shorter right so our brains are hardwired to pay very close attention to the beginning of everything and then to form opinions about whether this is a really good place to invest our energy or not right it's just one of the hard-wired shortcuts that we have in our brain right so i share that because over the
01:30 - 02:00 years you know i always struggle with what's the right way to introduce our company i think matthew did a better job than i have we know three things one we know the high-tech industry we only work within the microsoft ecosystem we only work with partners like yourselves we do that work all over the world we do that work internally with microsoft itself i developed the selling methodologies for cloud surestep i developed the selling methodologies that
02:00 - 02:30 microsoft makes available to its partners that's mechanical stuff we understand how to acquire customers right that's our differentiator combination of what joanne was talking about in terms of offer development go to market digital engagement marketing capabilities and then the last mile which is the selling right but how we do that is what i hope you take away from today anyone that shows up on stage and says hey i've got this great selling
02:30 - 03:00 methodology you just implement my system and the customers will come how many people here have been through some form of solution selling class multiple times yeah i've been through every one there is under the planet right i spent 20 years selling to big and small and medium companies around the world like i've seen it all right but what i hope you take away from today is the neuroscience part of it the more
03:00 - 03:30 we understand about what happens inside our buyers brains the easier it is for you to adapt what you sell and how you sell and who you sell it to right because you're going to be going back to the base so when i open this up with how long does it take for you to make up your mind about whether this is a useful thing to sit through versus get a coffee versus leave the room versus read your email right that is exactly what our prospects
03:30 - 04:00 and our customers do when we show up right it's a heuristic it's how the brain is designed so what i'm going to do over the next uh 30 minutes 35 minutes or so is i want to share with you a little bit of brain science uh that unfolds in every sales cycle you're going to participate in so who here in the room is responsible for generating money yeah the rest of you should have your hands up as well
04:00 - 04:30 right so so so i want to share with you from a psychological perspective what goes through the brain in a buying journey and then i want to make it real and tangible in terms of how do you actually take that knowledge and apply it and implement it inside a sales cycle to make it repeatable given what it is that you do which is primarily sell technology solutions uh and implement them and then sell managed services so this here is a brief shortcut
04:30 - 05:00 to how your brain is designed to make decisions now we're going to apply it to selecting a managed service provider or selecting a software solution but this is used pretty much for everything right your brain makes up about three percent of your body's mass and it consumes about 24 percent of your body's energy all day long it's not a very efficient organ so it's always looking for ways to conserve
05:00 - 05:30 energy for fighting and fighting and things like that right it's looking to take a shortcut a stereotype is a shortcut oh that's mark oh he's from vancouver oh i hate those people huh i haven't even started talking yet she's like yeah i know i'm mark vancouver ah geez i can't leave i'm in the front row too right but it's your brain you may have met someone from vancouver and you didn't like them or you're jealous of the wonderful weather that we have out there or maybe even jealous of our hockey team
05:30 - 06:00 unlikely right but but but your brain says okay vancouver don't like vancouver mark's from vancouver transfer that don't like on to mark oh don't even need to pay attention it all happens in the blink of an eye so so here is how decision making actually happens and before i walk you through this how many people think they make logical rational choices in life for the most part yeah yeah not anymore so your brain
06:00 - 06:30 when it is forced uh to make a choice i use the word choice you want to change the reaction that prospects and customers have to making decisions change the word decision to choice you get a radically different physiological response right but the first thing your brain decides is primacy pay attention to the beginning is this something i should invest my time and energy in if the answer is yes it will continue on to anchoring so there are so many variables in
06:30 - 07:00 selecting a managed service provider selecting a technology provider selecting solutions that the brain basically says i want to anchor in on one key thing that i think is more important than the others so that i can make the decision-making process easier now what would be one potential anchor that a customer could use to make a decision this is the interactive part i have rewards
07:00 - 07:30 yeah yeah this could be the cost or the price so you get one of these stress brains yeah okay so one what would be another anchor how you're dressed that doesn't reward me i shouldn't reward answers like that but you were close so yeah but it's the perception is this individual that's showing up are they dressed appropriately for the type of individual that i want to hire to do this work for sure so the brain will always anchor on something
07:30 - 08:00 and then it forms what's called a premature cognitive commitment means i make up my mind quickly with no data your brain is hardwired to make very quick decisions based on very limited data it's a survival mechanism right it works extremely well when strangers come over the hill a thousand years ago and you have to make a choice do i go and befriend them or run for my life but it's not really useful when you're trying to buy technology or picking a new managed service provider but that's how your brain works after
08:00 - 08:30 it's formed its premature cognitive commitment i like this or i don't like this goes into confirmation bias which means i now collect information that suggests i'm right and i ignore all information that suggests i made a mistake has anyone worked with someone like this yeah right so your brain is hardwired after that we move into the consistency principle consistency principle is anchored in social inclusion has nothing to do with picking managed service providers
08:30 - 09:00 and i.t solutions but what it basically suggests is that once we make up our mind we don't change it it's one of the four most powerful behavioral patterns that we have once we make up our mind we don't change it even though the evidence suggests there's a better reason can anyone work with someone like that that would rather be right than happy i married one
09:00 - 09:30 they make good yeah here you need a stress brain i can tell you that yeah there's a reason i travel and then the last part no it's not true i love my wife dearly uh is recency so your brain pays attention to beginnings and endings of everything you'll remember that the beginning and the ending of this conference so remember the beginning and the ending of presentations remember the beginning of the ending of jobs you've had courses of study that you've taken
09:30 - 10:00 relationships that you've been in your brain is wired to pay attention to beginnings and endings and it's designed to forget the middle to save energy right so you take this and you ask yourself is this really the right way to pick a managed service provider no but it will apply that that approach and i'm making this up this is behavioral economics 101 this is how the brain is designed to make choices it just wasn't designed to choose the things that we sell so what how this plays itself out in a sales
10:00 - 10:30 cycle if we think about here's the sales skills that i need to to execute across the duration of the sales cycle from start to finish what we were primarily trained on in terms of solution selling was focus more in the middle ask some questions about what it is that the client or the prospect needs try to go back and make something up
10:30 - 11:00 that's different from everybody else and then email them a proposal i got trained on how to do that now the only reason we were able to get away with it for so many years is because we could hold the prospects hostage because we knew more than they did they couldn't get demos they couldn't get competitive pricing they couldn't even get scope they couldn't get terms conditions they
11:00 - 11:30 couldn't get anything so we could hold them hostage until we figured out a way to be different and today to be quite candid we kind of sell bananas right i.t has become a commodity most managed services have become a commodity what i hope you took away from joann's previous discussion is we need to be a little bit more creative about how we bundle our stuff up right the most successful msps that i see working with you know various microsoft partners around the world which is why i love the
11:30 - 12:00 opening keynote today is they're anchoring these differentiators in terms of their offer in something that you do know more than they know more about which is security and compliance and risk right so you think about emotional selling rebuilding the selling motion so that aligns with how the brain behaves it actually changes everything you want to do your best work at the beginning
12:00 - 12:30 you want to do your best work at the end where the brain is most engaged because up front it focuses on primacy my first meeting with you my first telephone call with you my first interaction with you and i'm going to form some anchoring choices what's most important in the selection and i'm going to for in some premature cognitive commitments is this a good sales professional to work with is this a good company to work with a lot of that now gets fundamentally
12:30 - 13:00 formed even before they speak to you when you go to their website right anyone here kind of looked forward to doing business with a company gone to their website and going oh bit disappointing and that is not insurmountable if you do choose to talk to a sales professional but it really puts that poor individual on their back foot so what i'm going to argue is that solution selling as it's designed is no longer effective and i see thousands and thousands of
13:00 - 13:30 sales professionals i've been doing this for 10 years i have worked with the top performing sales professionals in so many different theaters around the world in the microsoft ecosystem i i see the good the bad and the ugly and i'll tell you the ones that are succeeding are the ones that have extremely strong front ends right and they have extremely compelling back ends in terms of being able to articulate the value that an organization is going to get from what it is they're about to purchase right so it changes now
13:30 - 14:00 what it also argue is that in the cloud uh you've got three different sales motions to choose from in the previous discussion with joanne she kind of brought out the analogies around the instant camera versus the phone versus the slr so this is an extremely complex sales motion we're not going to talk about that today but you're going to have to decide based on what you sell and who you sell to are
14:00 - 14:30 we going to engage and drive the entire sales cycle remotely so sell the whole thing on the phone or is there going to be an on-site visit because when you when you make that design decision you're moving from an accelerated remote three-step sales process highly repeatable uh to an acceptance that there is going to be differences account to account that are meaningful and that you need to physically go and meet them to
14:30 - 15:00 understand truly what it is that they're looking for and or the dollar value is big enough that they're going to want to meet you now what i see today most sales professionals will pursue all three of these opportunities with whatever they've been trained in so if they happen to have been trained in solution selling well when an easy out of the box how much is this going to cost opportunity comes along they apply this methodology to that and they over complicate everything and they
15:00 - 15:30 don't win or vice versa right so my first step so what that means to us uh is is it's important to understand which of those three motions we're going to drive and the second part is document it how many people have some kind of documented sales process yeah right so i would say 10 15 percent of the room raise their hand
15:30 - 16:00 right so so think about think about what it feels like to bring in a new sales professional right and then that poor individual sits down and says okay what do i do well here's some product training there's a phone all right go talk to a smart person if you have a problem oh you're on boarded on we go
16:00 - 16:30 how many people have something like that in place yeah no hands in the air it you'd be shocked at how big some of the companies are that we work with that's the onboarding process it's product product orientation you're the sales professional you figure it out now all i've done here um this that looks a little mildly complicated but it's not it's just this is a five call close like call number one first of all i'm going to do some research call number one call number two
16:30 - 17:00 call number three call number four call number five can i have some money please my instinct is many of you drive a sales motion that looks similar to that right in in many cases it's it's three discovery sort of solution proposal and then the closing sequence where you try to collect the money three call close now what's underneath here is the repeatable assets that you want to develop so that you can actually do
17:00 - 17:30 that thing not just faster but better not just faster but better more and more of your sales communications are going to come in the form of either telephone conversations or assets that go back and forth you can call them emails or you can call them letters or whatever they're going to go back and forth in documentation now how many people in the room have some form of standardized
17:30 - 18:00 documentation that you would give to this new sales professional you've just hired yeah that's good about 20 percent of the room how many sales professionals do you think are really good at writing that's not an easy question to ask i can tell you this not many i've given sales teams fully completed packaged documentation that are specifically written for their solution set and six months later i get it back and they've broken it all
18:00 - 18:30 right filled with all kinds of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes and they've made it all kinds of complicated so my point around this is that to drive repeatability and to line up with what joanne was talking about in terms of offer development make it easy to do business with you first thing you want to do is just kind of map out at a very high level what does our sales motion look like and then what are the the reusable assets that we can put together to help drive that now how many of you sell something that
18:30 - 19:00 is sufficiently complicated or more expensive and you feel like you're gonna have to go on site more often than not yeah right so that repeatable three-step sales process is a really strong motion if you want to collect a high number of customers at a relatively low cost and what you're selling is generally the same most of the time now with those underlying assets i'm going to share some with you in just a
19:00 - 19:30 moment you can look different from everybody else even if what you're selling is the same as everybody else and that will be enough for the brain to go i like this individual or that company better than another but if you do have to go on site what i can tell you is that when you do you're going to want to position some form of assessment or collaborative workshop like how many of you have one of those yeah how many of you go into every
19:30 - 20:00 opportunity looking for an opportunity to sell one of these yeah so now we're about 10 to the room i'll tell you this uh everybody in this room will drive one of three sales outcomes now i don't know individually what yours is but i will know that every single one of you in this room will drive a 20 win rate a 50 win rate or an 80 win rate those are the only three
20:00 - 20:30 numbers that exist that's it 20 50 and 80. i have white boarded sales methodologies and sales processes with hundreds of partners around the world microsoft partners msps isvs dynamics vars systems integrators and so when you do that week in week out year in year out you start to see some pretty fascinating patterns show up and i'll tell you the condition
20:30 - 21:00 of a 20 win rate company is we sell everything to everybody if you offer everything in your portfolio to everybody i would be shocked if you had a win rate that was higher than 20 percent as long as you count your win rate from here once you know enough about an opportunity to make a conscious business decision to go forward and make an investment
21:00 - 21:30 bring in resources build the proposal like you understand what they're asking for it's impossible to go back after that now the reason i share that is because every single 50 and 80 percent win rate partner i have worked with in the world very bold statement goes into every opportunity looking for some form of assessment right do you always find something to sell not always sometimes there's just no
21:30 - 22:00 risk and so there's no reason to actually promote an assessment but the consciousness is let's go find out what's wrong with this opportunity rather than why we're a good fit for it right so i listened to the keynote this morning my first thought was boy where there is fear there is money and and and where there is candidly where there's confusion there is margin so if you do not have some kind of wedge offering or assessment
22:00 - 22:30 uh and it can be focused on the technology or it could be focused on the people or a combination of the two around security you're leaving a huge opportunity on the table that's a condition of the 50s and the 80s so what i want to do is uh with the time that i have with you today i want to focus on three different sales capabilities or skills there's corresponding exercises we're going to take a few minutes between the three so that you can capture some brainstorming around it
22:30 - 23:00 that i believe if you uh if you if you implement or experiment will have a material impact on your sales conversations immediately now the first has to do with the types of questions that we ask how many have taken some kind of sales training class on asking really good open versus closed-ended questions yeah right most of us have been through some sort of thing like that doesn't mean we do it every day but at least we
23:00 - 23:30 understand the difference between open and closing well that's level 100. that'll kind of help you open up the levers and get information flowing but that will not get you to the good stuff the two biggest mistakes that i see sales professionals make is they care about and talk about the stuff in the reverse sequence that the actual customer does so it is not uncommon for a sales professional in a role play scenario say hey what's your budget how are you
23:30 - 24:00 going to pick one of the vendors to run this project what is it that you're actually looking for us to bid on uh what are the it challenges that you've got underneath that and then if they're if they're if they're good they might move on to what risks do you have in the business and finally they'll get to well what is the business trying to accomplish you're a professional services firm you're not a manufacturer help me understand a little bit more about what you're trying to do so a sales professional unconsciously
24:00 - 24:30 will go bottom up because they care about these things more than they care about those what order do you think the customer cares in the opposite order the last thing that they care about i mean they understand what the general costs are they've had managed service providers come to them before they have one today like there's no magic office 365 or whatever antivirus technology they know what the costs are so what they care most about is i've got business problems i've got business
24:30 - 25:00 risks i don't entirely know what my scope is or could or should be at the end we're kind of going to get that sorted out and maybe we'll get to a price in the end so the most powerful thing that we can do as sales professionals is change the sequence in which we ask questions right because not all of these are equal now the second thing that we're going to do and this is going to lead to our first exercise is to change the way we sequence the
25:00 - 25:30 questions now a bit of a difficult uh it's a difficult answer to give in a highly public environment but who here has ever had the pleasure of going to a therapist yeah a friend of mine went once and here's what he told me hey you can just imagine yeah so therapists are trained to ask questions in a very deliberate way just imagine i show up at the therapist
25:30 - 26:00 mark what brings you in here today oh so glad you asked i took a taxi oh one of those eh okay no no i mean mark really really what brings you in here right uh well you know i got this situation at home you know with my wife okay fine the question is a what question a what question is answered by your
26:00 - 26:30 neocortex the spock part of your brain it's non-threatening it's logical it's very difficult to get emotionally wrapped up in a what question so what a therapist will do is answer or ask two or three or four or five if it's me what questions what's the issue you know what's the implication what makes you think now is the time to work all those things and when they feel like they've got something they'll kind of shift to uh how well mark how is that impacting your
26:30 - 27:00 relationship with your wife right now how is responded to by the emotional brain primarily your visual brain so you start to see things if you're visual right and that and your and your visual processing in your brain is located right next to your emotional center so when you start to see things you start to feel things and then the last question will be okay mark well why is it so important for you to work on this now
27:00 - 27:30 [Music] living at the holiday inn i want to go home right but if you just walk in the door and they say hey mark why are you here today you're going to get a what answer now who here is a trained therapist yeah yeah they don't find their way into these rooms i don't understand why right um because unless you've been schooled in that you'll never stumble across this discovery process
27:30 - 28:00 so so the magic in this is how do you take the i probably got five or six different things to talk about right everything from the price all the way up to the business challenges and then what are the questions that i can ask from a what how in a why perspective how can i sequence them because the human brain is hardwired to work in a stimulus response manner what's your budget for the project well
28:00 - 28:30 you know what i'd rather not disclose that okay well it's really important for us to understand what we're working with yeah well you're the expert what is it going to actually cost to implement this stuff well we don't really have enough information yet well what more information do you need sound familiar right so that how much is a ball a string thing that's about bouncing back and forth stimulus response that's contest and if contest goes on long enough it becomes conflict so this is a way of saying ask question
28:30 - 29:00 number one right i'm going to go in here hey so scope of services what it responsibilities are you looking to outsource to an external managed services provider and they will say something blah blah blah blah blah and your natural reaction will be to step into oh we can do that or how did you land on that scope of services
29:00 - 29:30 they didn't just wake up last week and say let's change our msp there's something going on and they're going to tell you something here and then well which of those services do you feel is the most important for this particular project what we're trying to do is trying to figure out why are they doing this what will they tell me that they won't tell a competitor so if you were to hire me tomorrow to be your sales professional right and i didn't know really anything about the industry i could take this little grid here and i could sit
29:30 - 30:00 down there and i could go into almost any opportunity and and i just keep on asking questions and i'm gonna come out the other end understanding the context of the project not just what it is that they're going to do right so here's the little three to five three minute exercise i'm going to give you what i'd like you to do is to pick on the two sort of medium level questions
30:00 - 30:30 vendor selection and cost those are easy things to do discovery on perceived risks and business objectives are a little hard right so think about the why the how and the what this is the what this is the how and this is the why so pick one of these things i'm going to give you a couple minutes and say okay so what is a what question that i could ask what is a natural sort of how question i could follow with and then what would be kind of an impactful why question now all why questions don't start with
30:30 - 31:00 why but it's got something to do with an electrical charge money risk and control and i'm going to give you three minutes to brainstorm that on the sheet that you've got it looks easier than it is all right
31:00 - 31:30 right now
31:30 - 32:00 so
32:00 - 32:30 you
32:30 - 33:00 so
33:00 - 33:30 okay who's got a really good what
33:30 - 34:00 question who's got a really good what question what's your level of confidence in your current i.t cybersecurity planning yeah it's a great question so what is your level you're not going to get a yes or no answer you're going to get a very expansive answer and it's going to give you an opportunity to step into the next well help me understand why is that a priority that is a good one you get a brain
34:00 - 34:30 who's got a good how question yeah or how do you feel just adding the word feel in there would make a difference how do you feel your new environment is working for you oh good bad okay well can you share a little bit more about that and how about a y let's get a good why
34:30 - 35:00 question yes even though it starts with a what that is one of the best why questions because what it does is also stimulates a visual what happens if that system fails well has that ever happened before [Music] these are soft yeah i can't throw okay so when i sit down
35:00 - 35:30 working with a partner or a sales team to map one of these things out right i got six different dimensions of things that i could talk about doesn't mean that they're the only six right if you start to get into application modernization data modernization some of the other some of the other azure workloads you know you may choose other categories but when i sit down and say here's the six things i want to talk about it can generally take as a group hour
35:30 - 36:00 hour and a half sometimes two hours to really land on well what are the right questions and then as you go and put those into practice you may find over time you make some adjustments to them but i will tell you this it is impossible to ask 18 questions in an hour you will run out of time before you get to the end of the questions but you will have a very different sense of what this project is really all about so change the sequence in which you focus
36:00 - 36:30 on what's most important and the other thing is move to what how and why questions now the second thing i want to pivot to is differentiation how many of you struggle a rhetorical question uh with differentiation in your market yeah yeah i can tell you this we do hundreds and hundreds of website audits i work with thousands of sales professionals over the years there's a lot of similar messaging that comes out right so but i will share this with you there are two types of differentiation
36:30 - 37:00 one type of differentiation speaks to the logical brain 40 instructions per second the other differentiation speaks to the emotional brain 9 million instructions per second they are not equal 9 million versus 40 not even close if you're in there talking about i got a great product i got a great price uh i've got great people i'm i'm local the part of the brain that listens to that is the logical brain it is
37:00 - 37:30 important you have to have good people the price has to be reasonable uh you've got to be geographically important to them and you got to have great resources but i will tell you real differentiation happens at an emotional level i am a member of your tribe you can use the word industry you could use the word vertical like just imagine me coming up here and saying hey i really appreciate everybody in the room showing up today i've never actually spoken to it people before
37:30 - 38:00 but boy i'm a really good sales trainer i work with furniture manufacturers on a regular basis place would be empty right so we've got to quickly establish i'm a member of your tribe i speak your language i know your acronyms i understand your business models i understand your profitability challenges right so when someone understands how many of you focus on an industry or vertical yeah my instinct is your win rates and those industries and verticals is much higher than you win rates in the non-traditional ones how many of you focus on some form of
38:00 - 38:30 workload specialization yeah right so i've got a partner i'm working with right now their expertise is mergers and acquisitions they don't do m a they focus on the i.t challenges that come from companies when they merge together right that's a specialization that's tribal differentiation it's highly emotional right simplicity right brain three percent of the body mass forty percent uh twenty six percent of your body's energy what it's looking for is an opportunity
38:30 - 39:00 to take shortcuts all day long one of the shortcuts that it takes often is if something looks difficult or complex it punishes it it punishes complexity so big part of why what joanne was talking about earlier in terms of here's three offers the brain loves that it's simple still gonna have questions still wants to know double click what's underneath all of that but it's like oh thank god i'm so tired of those conversations about well it depends tell me everything about your
39:00 - 39:30 business it's because you speak to the emotional part here and these last two two most important two primary motivators of human behavior are fear and greed right fear and desire it gets us up out of bed uh compels us to do what we do largely runs at an unconscious level so to the degree that you can speak intelligently to here's the business impact that we have outcomes or here's the risk resistance here's what you avoid
39:30 - 40:00 those two things have huge emotional resonance now desire versus fear which one of those do you think is stronger fear but does anyone know what the factor is it's three times as a motivator of human behavior study after study measurement after measurement i wish it was different but but fear will get us into action into motion three times more effectively
40:00 - 40:30 or or quickly then i want that right we should be different but so it is so when you think about risk security compliance gdpr there's money to be made in there right we're not talking about fear mongering what we're talking about is really leveraging what is happening unconsciously in the minds of the business community right and then building solution sets to take that risk off the table that's emotional differentiation so
40:30 - 41:00 one of the ways that we can use this in a respectful way during the sales cycle is to create a very simple alignment email now this is a communication that would go from your sales professional to the prospect at the end of the discovery cycle so if you're running a three-step sales process it's probably at the end of two discovery calls if it's a more uh comprehensive sales motion it's at
41:00 - 41:30 the end of when you've gone on site and you really got your arms wrapped around what it is that they're trying to do but it's repeatable and it has an emotional impact when people receive it and it has a certain structure so if i was uh if i was invited in by one of you to come and work with your organization to help drive sales change i would i would create a version of this and what we start with is uh here's our understanding of the business drivers that are forcing you into hiring an
41:30 - 42:00 outside consultant to help you now i've obviously configured all of this for your business right so we've got growing i.t related employee downtime people are losing productivity because the systems are down we've got an increase in unbudgeted costs and increase in cyber security attacks we've got an increase in remote mobile workers how often do you think that changes customer to customer not really what you end up doing is you build an inventory of all the nasty terrible
42:00 - 42:30 things that drive the reasons that they call you and you end up deleting the ones that you are not relevant to the project right but but i'm the recipient of this i'm the person making the decision in the small business that you serve so what this tells me is boy they listen to what i said on the phone but we start with the negative captures their attention then we go to the positive here's the new capabilities that we understand you're looking for at the end of this investment you want enterprise grade threat detection small medium-sized business i want to
42:30 - 43:00 get protected like i was a large enterprise i want to be able to control and manage sensitive project information this is anchored in a professional services model so this is customer language right it's not you're going to have multi-level protocol protection and what what am i really buying right centralize all my project communication and documents in a single place right not you're buying sharepoint or buying some form of online onedrive right so we start with here's
43:00 - 43:30 the business drivers that we understand are pushing this and by the way don't put these things in the headings i had i had a sales professional once said mark this alignment email this thing's fantastic it's making a big difference i'm like okay let me see your version of it yeah don't do that right just this but the other half of it is here's the anticipated impact so based on what you shared with us all positive you're going to improve compliance and reduce business risk
43:30 - 44:00 you're going to reduce the rework of your professional services people because they're working on current versions of of the documentation you're going to be able to onboard a new consultant in a single day in a safe and productive way right so whatever those anticipated benefits are right and i can tell you i work with a lot of professional services firms these look very similar all the time and then what are the next steps here's the next steps that we would recommend we go through one of which should be going in and doing some form of assessment or a discovery session hey
44:00 - 44:30 you know and then it's a mark stewart managed services specialist right so just imagine you're the sales professional you know you're the buyer you've hired are you looking to replace your managed service provider you've got a particular project in mind maybe you're moving to the cloud maybe you've already done that you want to do something different but you got three or four managed service providers bidding on the same business one does this clearly captures business drivers clearly captures new capabilities
44:30 - 45:00 clearly captures the outcomes they're looking for and clear next steps and then the other three sales reps send something like hey thanks for your time today really appreciate you sharing uh more about the project here's a bunch of pdfs and links to content on our website proposals coming next week the brain loves to compare and contrast that's how it makes decisions if it has one thing here's my one price joanne talked about
45:00 - 45:30 this earlier doesn't know what to do with it all it can do is compare it to somebody else's price but you put two or three prices it can compare those things and now it'll choose from you it's the same with this so they'll receive three really uninteresting emails one of these and go i like this individual i like this company they listen but that's a highly reusable document so if i go back to that sales methodology i showed earlier this is just one of a handful of different sales assets i created all of
45:30 - 46:00 these for microsoft cloud surestep program they're all publicly available they're not as polished up as this nice one here right but all of this stuff is out there for you to consume right and then if we had a little bit more time i would have you try to build one of these things right now but but i want you to take this exercise back to your organization and start to implement it who here manages sales people right make sure you want to drive some change get blind cc'd on the alignment email
46:00 - 46:30 that goes out in every single net new opportunity or every net new opportunity within your existing install base right and not not from a from a it's a forcing function it's not a i want to monitor you but what it will do is it'll force them to think through well what are the business drivers what are the new capabilities that they're looking for what is it that we're trying to do here right so the last thing i want to share with you very briefly and then we'll wrap it up has to do with proposals
46:30 - 47:00 how many people in the room email their proposals to their prospects yeah right don't do that anymore please now if you've been working with this customer for years and years you've got a trusted relationship with them that's not what i'm talking about here like this is a competitive scenario where the business is at risk so i go back to primacy and recency the brain pays attention at the beginning at the end you want to be present at the end when they're making a choice between you and somebody else and what
47:00 - 47:30 you don't want to do is to hand them a whole pile of documentation why because the brain punishes complexity it will reward simplicity so what we know is that and i'll leave this in all the materials that we leave behind here you want to take your proposal and you want to build it into something that's visual now i've over built this these are the various categories of things that you want to
47:30 - 48:00 talk about the reason that you want to talk about them is because to drive a decision you actually have to in it implement a little bit of tension into the conversation no risk no tension no desire don't have to decide today so you take all this information that you collect during the sales cycle all you do is organize it in a different way and what you end up with is a lot more choices how many people in the room here have lost a fair bit to no decision
48:00 - 48:30 over the last little while you will lose more to a no decision today than you will to any one single competitor in your marketplace and no decision is there's no consequence to not doing this i can delay i can apply my capital somewhere else right so what i'm going to suggest you do is you sequence your content you start with here's what we understand is driving the need for you to change msps or to move to the cloud or to invest in
48:30 - 49:00 greater technology here's the operational challenges that we have discovered as we do our work with you here's the risk or the economic impact of what it is that's occurring to you today that's the hardest stuff to collect now you're at the top of the curve and you come down the other side here's the solution that we're going to recommend here's the approach that we're going to use to deploy this here's the implementation uh here's the cost here's the benefits can i have some money please whoop
49:00 - 49:30 whoop now do you think the content in here changes radically from account to account no especially if you're focused on a vertical or an industry or workload so the example that i've got in here for you i knew i wasn't going to have time to walk through the whole deck but i wanted to leave it with you is a fully completed example of what i would use if i was selling an msp solution set to a professional services firm
49:30 - 50:00 and now what i would encourage you to do is to copy it take a version of this build it for yourself and then instead of emailing the proposal you phone up the prospect and say look i need 20 to 30 minutes of your time i want to share with you our complete understanding of your project i want to share with you the recommendation that we're making i want to share with you the pricing right before we send over our final 32-page document just to make sure that we've got everything right
50:00 - 50:30 and inevitably what will happen is the conversation will surface something in the discussion and it will change something but again just imagine you're the buyer sales professional one goes through this takes them through the journey off the other side and what you see anchored there is here's what you're going to have to pay but it's counter balanced with here's the benefits that you're going to get versus the other three sales professionals who simply email the proposal to them which never gets read
50:30 - 51:00 i like that firm they're different i don't make this stuff up well part of it i do but but i'll tell you this this is representative of the best practices that we see working with some of the uh highest performing uh partners on the planet and it doesn't matter if you're selling uh managed service solutions to small and medium-sized businesses or we apply this to selling large enterprise enterprise grade solution sets where you're competing against some
51:00 - 51:30 pretty huge companies the psychology that weaves through all of it is all the same right so anyway here's my closing guidance don't email proposals unless it's to an existing client they're just going to buy anyway you want to be present when they're making decisions prepare transition questions as you go from one section to the next as you go through here right focus on risk reduction because that's three times the power of the desire and the greed and always ask for some form of commitment at the end of this presentation because
51:30 - 52:00 at the end of it all if they have an objection it will get surfaced then we don't actually ask people to make a commitment in the moment because we think they're going to give us one you know we ask because we want to flush out the objection that they don't want to share with you that's the reason we ask right we don't sell shoes and cars right we asked for a commitment just to flush out the objection because i'd rather handle it in front of them rather than leave the room and have them come out at me later you know after they've made a decision to go with another vendor
52:00 - 52:30 all right thank you so much for your time if you have any questions about any of this stuff i'm going to be of course having lunch next door but we'll be around for the next couple of hours take some time go back to the office put a small little group together map out the questions that you think or you're going to make a meaningful difference in terms of driving discovery land on an alignment email template and then templatize the proposal presentation on the back end and have that live conversation with the prospect
52:30 - 53:00 remotely like you have to go physically there and i can almost guarantee you it will have a material impact on your close rate thanks for your time thank you so much mark thank you so much all right guys so we're a little bit uh over scheduled so a q a will be over lunch is that all right but maybe we can take a couple minutes i was exciting stuff very interesting is there anybody who'd like to ask mark a
53:00 - 53:30 question or two and be rewarded with a brain any questions yes the the proposal itself well uh so i don't want anything to sound too flippant it was a great question what if the prospect says no i don't really want to meet with you just email the proposal so so one i would say well we don't want to physically meet with you i just need 20 to 30 minutes of your time online i want to walk you through our
53:30 - 54:00 presentation remotely because it's not uncommon for us to find out once we start a project that we've misinterpreted one or two things that an organization like yours has shared so what we do is we put this thing in advance of sending the proposal over because it's no fun to step into a change order conversation later so so the conversation it's high level it's the reason we want to do this is really for your benefit so that if you know you have all the information you need to make a decision if we're the right choice for you yeah we always frame up why we want to
54:00 - 54:30 do something for their benefit so what i've also had sales professionals try to do is say well this is really important for our organization right we need to go through this for us never work don't care about you just email it over right so we always have to frame it is there some consequence for you if we don't have this interim step it's a great question here's your brain there we go yes
54:30 - 55:00 when you do a formal assessment do you offer a full report on the assessment before you actually do a proposal yeah really good question when we do an assessment of some kind do you offer some form of formalized report my recommendation is always always you know so the magic to the assessments is you want to make it as fast as possible as small as possible and as cheap as possible so a lot of times consulting organizations will say hey this is a great chance to go in and
55:00 - 55:30 identify all the risks right the project gets bigger this is about winning a deal right so the assessment should be what i've learned over the years is that if you got a if you think it's a hundred thousand dollar project all up total contract value you want to try to keep the assessment to two to three percent of what the total value is once you get up into five percent six percent seven percent well that's a pretty big investment maybe we should you know have other people bid on it right but my favorite workshops to facilitate
55:30 - 56:00 one day two day three day maximum and then there's a report what you find is the report if you're focused on an industry a vertical a segment or a particular workload very very similar yeah so the comment was it really depends on the fear and the confusion so if there's no perception of risk there's no read to do this reason to do the assessment so the assessment isn't funded discovery right so
56:00 - 56:30 when you think about packaging up those assessments think about i'll tell you this the best sales professionals super paranoid you want to hire a sales professional that's sort of 50 kind of lazy 50 paranoid they'll do the best work there's a bit of greed in there but mostly paranoid right so so if you go into every deal as a sales professional looking for why is this project going to run into problems later why is this problem project going to
56:30 - 57:00 fail you'll find it every time right if you but if you go in thinking why are we the best choice well you'll find that too right but that doesn't help the client so if you change that context to what's going to get in the way of them getting value from this and then you use that as the hey you got to kind of stop the process we really recommend you do this one day workshop there's a cost associated with it how many of you give it away for free today don't do that anymore i've done it hurts right so always
57:00 - 57:30 charge for it um and and the reason you want to pay for that is regardless of which vendor you choose to go down the path with these risks are real right you can take the output report which we're going to give you you can give it to our competitor you're going to have a better project in the end right that's the way to position these things i'm very passionate about this i did this for 10 years of my own sales career i sold assessments i delivered them i know how hard it is i also know the outcomes in terms of the win rates that they drive
57:30 - 58:00 did you get a brit there we go yeah it's a fantastic comment question which was a lot of the not a lot of some of the new proposal software allows you to embed video right inside
58:00 - 58:30 the proposal what are my thoughts on that well i will tell you this the part of your brain right now that is listening to me speak that processes auditory signals 40 instructions per second huge gap between that and the emotional brain and and in that gap is is mark telling the truth does he really understand the business that we're in you're interpreting the tone if you're english as a second language you're trying to convert all of this in your brain it's a really inefficient way of
58:30 - 59:00 communicating video nine million instructions if anyone if anyone goes to our website all you see is video there's nothing i'm talking about here today that you don't find in videos videos i was in the studio all day yesterday creating more videos for the website video is the most powerful way of connecting with the prospect the more you know about the industry the more you know about the video the more specifically you can talk to the business problems the more you will win yeah i do a lot of work training sales professionals on how to use video early in the sales cycle
59:00 - 59:30 but it's just as effective in the end all right mark yeah all right last one what are my thoughts around that yeah how many people today when they have a conference call with a eve even a customer or a prospect turn on video yeah so what my experience first of all
59:30 - 60:00 oh everyone's ah jeez we'll just throw them up in the air um as soon as you tap into two things one visuals right the second thing is novelty so today very few people feel comfortable turning on video and so almost all calls are auditory so when you show up and say hey you know what you don't have to turn yours on but i want so i turn on you get a completely different level of engagement right uh one of two things will happen
60:00 - 60:30 one they will then turn on their video as long as they're fully clothed and in a in a background that's acceptable right so sometimes i gotta look behind me on my whiteboard and say okay what's up there you know they don't want to see that stuff right um but what it will do is it will unconsciously compel them to not multitask even though they're not visual they will be very reluctant on the back end to do other things
60:30 - 61:00 right so be courageous put yourself out there i actually it's funny you mentioned this i was in my home office two days ago with a video guy ordering up lights that we can bounce off the wall so that you can actually see my face better because every call i do with people like sherweb i always turn on the video as long as i'm appropriately dressed and there is nothing on the back i do not have a green screen in my office
61:00 - 61:30 yeah there we go a very good professional image on the back end yeah so video video video video video 9 million instructions per second any other questions that you have i have some remaining brains i'll be out there at lunch happy to spend as much time as i can with you if you do not go back and do one of those three things change the questions that you ask document them structure an email alignment template or
61:30 - 62:00 a land on some form of modified proposal for presentation if you do not do any of those three things in the next seven days you will not i do all right with that thank you mark one more round of applause please thanks appreciate it