Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. I’m Jeff Standridge.
Jeff Amerine:
And this is Jeff Amerine, glad to be back.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, me too. You know, we had a great episode talking about the psychology of sales last week. And this week, Jeff, we’re gonna be hopping into the art of influence and persuasion. We touched on it a little bit last week, but we’re gonna really dig in a little deeper on it this week.
Jeff Amerine:
That sounds good. I mean, sales and marketing go ahead, go together like exercise and diet. Right. I mean, they, they’re kind of inseparable if you want to have a good result.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. And yeah, I appreciate you kind of pointing that out to me.
Jeff Amerine:
Well, that’s why I’m really glad that this is only a heads-up broadcast.
Jeff Standridge:
No doubt. That’s right. You can’t, you can’t see my Cheetos down here below the line. So yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about consumer behavior. You know, we touched on a little bit last week about the fact that clients couldn’t care less about what products and services you actually have to offer. Very seldom are they buying your brand or are they buying, particularly in the, in the, you know, if we’re anything below a household name, right, the top probably 1% of companies in the world, they could care less about your brand as much as they’re buying a solution to a problem or an unmet need that they have. And so I think that’s vitally, vitally important that we understand that and that our listeners understand that as well. If you think that you’re selling products, you’re probably going to be…significantly less successful in your sales career than if you are uncovering needs, uncovering business problems, and solving those on behalf of your clients.
Jeff Amerine:
And they’re really buying a benefit, right? They’re buying a benefit or an outcome versus a feature or a function.
Jeff Standridge:
They are. That’s right. That’s exactly right. They’re buying a benefit. They’re buying an outcome. They’re buying a solution. They’re buying the end result. Uh, now features and functions sometimes might help push it over the line, but if you don’t already have, uh, an identified unmet need that you’re solving for, uh, you’re, you’re just, you’re just fighting an uphill battle, so to speak.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s why I think it’s so important in the early stages of the process to make sure that you understand what their priorities are, what are those benefits that they’re trying to glean from a particular purchase, and a lot of times you’ll waste an inordinate amount of effort in the sales process by not going the extra step to understand how you can influence their thinking, but also really what’s on their priority list.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. And I’m glad you brought that up. What’s on their priority list? You know, clients will argue with your words, but they will not argue with their own. And so one of the things I like to do in a, in a discovery call is to play back for the customer or the prospect or the buying, the person buying my solution is to say, Hey, I’d like to play back for you. What I think I heard.
And I’d like you to tell me if I missed anything. You said that you have issue number one. Here’s the problem that you’re having or the challenge that you’re having or the thing that you’d like to solve for. Did I get that right? Yeah, yeah, you did. Here’s issue number two. And I explained that kind of to them as well. And here’s issue number three. And generally there are three to four of those issues that come out of a discovery call. And then I like to say, did I hit all of those right? Yeah, you absolutely did. Well, did I miss any?
No, I don’t think would you like to add any and sometimes they’ll go maybe 15% of the time. I say yeah You know, there’s one more maybe it’s in that number two that you talked about but there’s another one around so and so and I’ll say Well, let’s just add that one as a fourth one or as a fifth one And so I’ll play it back to them. They say yeah, you got it. I say, okay Did we get them all anything else you want to add? No, no, though. Those are it I said so if we can solve those four issues for you, you’d be pretty happy wouldn’t you? Yeah, I think I would Well, let me ask you one more question. Could your rank order those for me in terms of what’s most important, what’s second, third, and fourth most important. And so when I walk away from that discovery meeting, I wanna have those key issues that they have absolutely validated and even given me some of the words to use in them. And I wanna get their priority order. So when I go back then with a proposal, I can say, you said to me this, and you said to me that, and here’s where we’re coming in to address that.
Jeff Amerine:
You know, it’s also good as part of that, and we’ve talked about this before, to understand how a purchase decision is made and who makes that decision. And you want to be real careful if you’re talking with a technical influencer or a recommender, not to be heavy handed in the way you do that, to assume that they immediately think you want to go above their head. But it is important to diplomatically understand, how do you purchase? You know, what’s the budget?
Jeff Standridge:
Oh yeah.
Jeff Amerine:
What’s the process? And you can do that in a way that won’t kind of raise the hair on the back and the neck of the person you’re talking to doing it wrong though, is immediately making statements like, well, I was talking to your CEO or I know your board members because immediately it sort of puts the, uh, that person that’s a recommender that was probably hired to manage that area on the defensive because they assume, well, everybody in the world has told you got to sell to the C-suite. These guys are trying to figure out how to make me insignificant.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah. I completely agree with you. And, and so many people think, and I can always tell an, an inexperienced salesperson if they say, oh yeah, our owner has a relationship with name, CEO, X, C, you know, or with the CFO. Oh, he’s best friends with the place golf every Friday with a CFO. Well, guess what? That’s the quickest way to never get your foot in the door. Because what happens is particularly when you’re doing enterprise sales, now selling into the mid market.
Jeff Amerine:
Exactly.
Jeff Standridge:
Okay, that may be different, but selling into enterprise sales, when the CEO brings in a, sometimes what we’ll call, we used to call them a CIP, a CEO-initiated project, right? And when someone comes in and they overly leverage their relationship with the CEO, there are throngs of people below the line, below the surface, looking to kill it for that very reason. And so I go back to our friend Jeff Charlton, who spent a lot of time with Sam’s Club as a technology executive and saying, the greatest advice he ever gave was, you really need to find a champion within the organization. Somebody who’s not at the CEO level, somebody who’s at a director, maybe a VP level, who’s a champion within the organization, and do everything you can to make them a hero. And let them know that you’re going to make them, you’re going to give them all the credit for them solving this problem. And then let them channel it up through the organization, uh, because they know the politics, they know the decision makers and they know how to get it to the right places.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, you want, you want to make the potential hero or champion, a hero or a champion and not a saboteur because you can convert them and they’re going to make it their mission to make sure that you’re, you’re maybe great solution. You have never sees the light of day. If you do it wrong.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. So to transition into kind of the content here of the art and influence of persuasion is we really start that with our marketing processes. So we’re constantly out there building a brand, so to speak, or building a brand recognition, building a perception about our company through all of the marketing that we do. So we do it with our social media. And one of the biggest struggles I think organizations have is they really don’t know how to leverage their social media to build and perpetuate the brand image that they really want to build and perpetuate. The way they perceive themselves and the way they would tell you their brand image is and what they would like their brand image to be, and you look at their social media, it’s just completely disconnected because they’re not
They’re not trying to use those two to drive one another.
Jeff Amerine:
Sure. And depending upon what the target audience is, it can be subtly done through things like if you’re selling to an enterprise, establishing thought leadership through things like white papers, through podcasts, through really interesting blog posts. Those sorts of things begin to build a base of awareness that is really not hard selling anything necessarily. It’s establishing we’re experts in this field and we’re giving you valuable information without necessarily any expectation of anything coming from it, but what’s really happening is they’re beginning to associate your brand and your marketing message with somebody they ought to know because it could be valuable to them.
Jeff Standridge:
Mm-hmm. That’s right. That’s right. You know, it’s interesting, our friends over at Dave Creek Media, who helped produce our podcast, came up with the term connected marketing architecture. For that very reason was because so many companies, particularly in the mid market, are completely disconnected. All of the various avenues of how they interact with a customer are completely disconnected. You know, they had their website built by an offshore contractor in some other country, their social media is being managed by the minority owners, third cousin’s sister. And, you know, they’ve got their email campaigns are being run by somebody that the owner met when he bought a dog from a guy, and I’m obviously playing it up a little bit here, but none of it’s connected. And it’s not really trying to, it’s not really working coherently to try to drive a particular brand message and to drive a particular level of authority and authenticity. And so it’s really, it’s producing probably more negative benefit than it’s producing positive.
Jeff Amerine:
Absolutely. And you can see that when those things are well connected, a good example would be if you’ve got an HVAC company, you know, more kind of a standard, great small business, the ones that do a really good job that say, well, these are the sorts of things to think about when you’re facing a hot summer season or a cold winter season. They don’t have to try to sell you anything, those repair services or those visits.
They’re really giving the consumer something valuable. You know, now it’s time to think about changing those filters out. It’s not a hard sell in their marketing message. It’s more of tips. It’s education. It’s maybe evangelizing for a new way to think about it. That’s, that is not used often enough, sometimes in small businesses in particular.
Jeff Standridge:
You know, you’re exactly right. And I used to say this when I was working in the marketing field on more of a regular basis with Axiom Corporation is that the availability of data and technology has far outgrown the vast majority of business people’s ability to actually leverage it. The sophistication, the level of complexity, yet the level of potential benefit. So
So having someone that can come alongside you and actually provide you with strategy and tools and tips and tactics or what have you to understand where it is you’re trying to go from a marketing perspective, a brand imaging perspective, a lead generation perspective or what have you. And then to help you put together a cogent strategy with all the different tactics and activities and what have you is, it’s, it’s, it can be expensive, but there’s a much greater opportunity cost by not doing that than, than by, you know, trying to string it together with all these people that really have, don’t have the expertise to bring it all together in a coherent whole.
Jeff Amerine:
Now it really is, it really is a great idea to have a firm like a Dave Creek media that can come alongside. They understand what you’re trying to achieve. They can build that framework and that structure. And then you might think, well, this is going to be a daunting task to come up with all this content. But a lot of that’s been democratized in the last couple of years with AI tools. You can get on a chat GPT or GPT four. You can come up with a variety of different blog posts, messages, and different things. And, and again. won’t do the thinking for you, but it will do some of the writing for you. It puts you in the editor mode. So, a lot of that’s been democratized in ways that never was before, where a business owner that can type in a prompt and play with that a little bit can come up with really good content.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. That’s right. And then we move on down to, you know, measuring the output and really understanding what are the goals that you’re trying to achieve with whatever marketing activities that you put out there, whether it’s SEO, are you trying to get the phone to ring? Are you trying to get website clicks? Are you trying to get, are you trying to get page likes on your Facebook or, or your Instagram or your LinkedIn or whatever? What are the goals that you’re trying to accomplish and then build marketing strategies? And measurement mechanisms to ensure that those goals are being met. Unfortunately, a lot of people, they hire a marketing firm that, that is basically a black box, and they don’t know, they know what they’re paying every month, but they’re not exactly sure what they’re getting in return and they’re scared to death that if they stop paying it, that it’s going to turn some invisible funnel off and they’re going to crater their business and they just, they live in fear all the time. So have a, have a relationship with whomever your marketer is.
to have them work through with you to extract what are the goals you’re trying to accomplish, what activities will actually produce those outcomes that you’re looking for, and then how can we close the loop on a weekly, monthly basis and show you that you’re actually getting those outcomes that you’re paying.
Jeff Amerine:
Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of classic scientific method or AB testing on that. You’ve got your outcomes and then you AB test a particular strategy or tactic and you give it some period of time to work and if it doesn’t work, you don’t just keep doing it. You change to something else that will work. That process of iteration is really important.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. Really is. So the art and science of persuasion, that’s today’s episode. Next week, we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna start digging into storytelling, brand messaging, and how do you actually create, what is brand messaging? What is your brand promise? And how do we master the art of storytelling in our business? That’ll be our next episode on the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Jeff Amerine:
See you next time.