Selling in a Time of Corona – S3E1 – Stand for Something

Season 3 Episode 1

Stand for Something

 Creative intro – Stand up for something ( Andra Day and Common )

“It all means nothing
If you don't stand up for something
You can't just talk the talk
You got to walk that walk, yes you do
It all means nothing
If you don't stand up for something
And I stand up for you
And I stand up for you, yes I will, yes I will”

So, someone ate a bat, apparently, and the world turned upside down. Hi, I'm Elliot Epstein and I spent the last 20 years of my life coaching, consulting, training and speaking about all facets of sales development, pitching presentations, negotiation, the C suite, sales calls and all of the various components in the sales cycle in between. And now we find ourselves in a world that's very foreign. Welcome to Selling in a Time of Corona.

Welcome to Season 3. Well, here we are again. And like you, I've spent the past 18 months online in Zoom teams and WebEx sessions. It's likely that your sales efforts will remain online for some time and indeed, in some form, forever. In this season, I want to continue to share with you some fresh ideas, new interviews and easier ways of getting the results you want as you navigate the world of business development, from the vantage point of your coffee-stained couch, kitchen table or second bottle of wine.

How do you achieve targets during lockdowns? How do you manage the need to be up for clients when some days, let's face it, you may feel flatter than the Earth at a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. How do you handle clients who are as tired, stressed and challenged as you are and whose kids are facing the same challenges as your kids? Spoiler alert ……  clients are just like you, human.

Well, most of them. I'm still waiting for the DNA tests back on procurement people, but the midlevel managers, the junior burgers and especially the C Level decision makers, they're in the same boat as you, just with a different set of oars. In the words of Shakespeare, “ If you prick their screens with another Zoom meeting, do their eyes not bleed?”

In this first episode, I'm going to pick up on Andra Day’s song and implore you to stand for something. Right now, fatigue is the natural enemy of boldness. Meeting after meeting, screen after screen, staring at the white laptop camera dot, and your colleague, who still thinks it's funny to have a Las Vegas background, “Hey, guys, look where I am!” (Hysterical, Frank).

Repetition does not breed excellence. It stifles creativity. Lack of human contact is not natural. So equally we have to adopt new behaviours that may not have been natural in the past. And the number one behaviour I want you to focus on is to stand for something and be politely but brutally direct with clients. Here are some of the biggest red flags happening in sales right now.

1. The misguided desire to educate clients

Account managers, presales and subject matter experts who think they've got an hour or more and think the client has the headspace to be educated in long winded technical webinars and a festival of slides slapped on the screen faster than a State Premier can yell “Lockdown!”

“But we need to educate the client in order to spark interest and then steer them towards the next stage of our sales cycle.” (Really? As if it's all about you.)

You know what virtually nobody is doing? 15 minute meetings or webinars with Q and A, all done and dusted in 30 minute slots. Max. If you can't generate interest in that time frame, you don't know the essence of your value well enough or they're not the right clients.

Here's a fun fact. The movie Titanic was once listed as two hours 17 minutes in their promotional piece because it was considered that three hours 10 was considered too long and would put people off.

A rule of thumb. Have the length of time you normally take to engage clients. Now put your Netflix head on. It should be easy, as the logo has probably burned its way into your retinas by now. Edit like you're a content serial killer, slashing superfluous information until you get to the marrow. Just the stuff that keeps the subject alive.

(Who knows? If you cut enough crap out of your presentations, you might get your own show ‘Crap Killers 2. )

2. Get to the point early.

So many old sales methodologies relied on building your case slowly but surely, with facts and data and evidence and dissertations on how your widgets work on the premise that the client would eventually say, “Oh, I see the beautifully constructed argument you've made here. Bravo! Well done. Excellent. I'll have 2” In 2021 they haven't got time to wait till the end of nine episodes of your company's series to discover who the killer was. Please stop deferring the recommendation to the end.

They're probably secretly self-harming under the desk while you take your time getting to the point of why you're there. Here are some examples of what you can do with those recommendations upfront:

“Good to see you all here. The reason we invited you to discuss Solution X is straightforward. It's the only solution in the marketplace right now that does X. We have yet to see a client who hasn't saved at least 60% of the overall cost after implementing this solution.  What we want to show you in just 15 minutes is how you can deploy X in half the time compared with what you would typically do now.”

“So instead of taking 6x months of your time working from home to roll out these logistics, we do it in just 12 weeks. We all know there's a labour shortage in the industry due to closes borders and travel restrictions. We can give you skilled feet on the ground so you don't have to defer key projects because you’re time poor with no personnel.”

“We exist for one reason. To keep production going, regardless of whether you're affected by Covid 19  restrictions, floods, bushfires or lockdowns.”

Once you stood for something, the client has the comfort of knowing exactly where you're going.

The client may jump in with questions or challenges. Great. Let them. If they want more detail, book another session. It means they're interested, and you've left them with a cliff-hanger. Most often they'll be waiting for you to prove it. And you've now got 10 to 15 minutes to cut to the chase using the Outcome./What/Why/How method? It sounds like this.

“We exist for one reason. To keep production going, regardless of whether you're affected by Covid 19 restrictions, floods, bushfires or lockdowns.”

“What we do is provide Solution X that prevents your systems from going down when affected by external events.”

“Why is that so critical? Because our clients, like ABC and XYZ tell us that supply chain certainty and system up time are the biggest challenges during Covid 19, and that your quarterly earnings are potentially in danger of not being met without a serious risk mitigation strategy. “

“How does it work? It's typically a two stage process, which we've done a number of times. It takes six weeks to implement, and you only pay US quarterly in advance, including 24 / support. It's typically also around 100 to $200,000 per quarter.”

(Yes, I mentioned pricing early in a discussion. Still too many companies, defer this crucial element because some old sales trainer with bad breath in a 1970s haircut told them to.)

There was also a huge, unnecessary reluctance to do this because someone in management once said, “Don't quote until it's fully scoped.”

Well A) nobody is signing an actual contract just yet. And B), if you've got 100 clients and they bought your solutions before, how can you not know a typical range of what the costs are? You're selling the thing.

If you really have to, just widen the range a little. Clients will respect you for it.

And if they shy away, you haven't lost the prospect. You've saved yourself six months of a sales cycle with someone who is likely going to struggle to fund it anyway. Don't believe those war stories people would brag about in pubs. ( Pubs…. I remember them, vaguely)

Don't believe them. Remember this? “Hey, Jeff, this company was going broke. They had no money. They were losing all its clients. But I hung in there for two years in that sales cycle, and eventually I got them over the line. Well, with a 75% discount.” Seriously!

3. Make it interactive. You know what they say about sex. It's usually a lot more fun with someone else in the room with you.

The Zoom sessions are not about you. They are the perfect opportunities to ask lots of questions of the client. So cameras and mics on. Always asked for this and treat these meetings as a discovery session. Lots of rich questions like “Tell me how you and your company are coping right now. What are you facing? Describe how you're addressing these challenges. What ways have you already thought about fixing these issues” and the big one,

“What did you most want to know from us?”

Take the pressure off yourself and let them talk and reveal. You'll need to relax and pause and not feel the need to jump in with some arse ways round, cack handed benefits statement. Just listen and hold ryr contact with the camera, not their face so they can see you listening.

So we've got a short, sharp session. You stood for something and cut to the chase, and you've got them to discuss their real issues. Whether you like the answers or not, you've just made their lives easier and in turn, yours.

And you've got more time up your sleeve to take the dog for its fifth lockdown walk of the day.

Woof.

Remember, your ears are safe. I recorded this entire podcast with a picture of Gladys and Dan hovering over the microphone listening to their favourite Aussie song.

Creative outro – Shutdown ( Australian Crawl )

“Shut down, shut down, you should shut down on her, hey-ey-ey-ey
Shut down, shut down, close enough so walk away-ay-ay-ay…..”

 

Take care of yourselves, till next time.