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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, we get prairie-dogged in our studio cube farm, fact-checker Doug almost gets demoted, and we handle one of the hardest questions we get as sales professionals from our buyers is, how do I measure what I m buying from you?
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Welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in podcast history.
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My name is Bill Kasky.
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I am Brian Neal.
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Welcome to all new listeners.
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We get lots of new listeners and lots of emails from people saying, hey, I just found your podcast.
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Where the hell have you been?
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Or I ve been binge listening to the last 700 and some odd episodes, of which there are a lot of odd episodes there.
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So we welcome you.
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If you re a newbie, you can go to advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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There s a list there of some of the most popular episodes.
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We d ask that you share that around, too.
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And then for those of you who ve been around before, listened for years, we love the fact that you re a fan.
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We love the fact that you re a loyal listener.
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And we know, because you do that, that you have a deep commitment to up your game.
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So we re going to personally invite you to become an ASP Insider, a group coaching program that meets once a month.
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where we, meaning Brian Neal and Bill Kasky, live, we coach you on relevant topics that are gonna help you grow your business, grow your income.
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The tuition is 47 bucks a month, or you can join for the whole year and you save some more cash.
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Go to advancedsellingpodcast.com slash insider.
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That s advancedsellingpodcast.com slash insider.
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For details, there s also a video that ll walk you through why we re doing this and specifically what s in it for you.
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That s advancedsellingpodcast.com slash insider.
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We got some flack from last week s show where we talked about certain things our wives said.
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So we won t be doing that anymore.
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We won t be doing that anymore.
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There s more rays.
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I just want to let you know that.
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I got prairie dug.
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Anybody know what getting prairie doggone is?
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I should be careful here.
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Yeah, you re going to go right back into the fire.
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That s prairie doggone.
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So prairie doggone is when you work in a cube farm, and then the person you re offending is shot up, which I do.
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It s on the video.
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It s really great.
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OK, topic today.
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The days of the cubes.
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Oh my god.
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When I worked for Woods Wire Company, we had a room where there were five desks.
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And we were all in our mid-20s and we d all go out drinking and partying probably three or four nights a week and
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And we literally would sit in there and laugh for six hours a day.
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So little work got done in the cube.
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It s funny.
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I think, oh my gosh, the hours that I wasted and the fun that I had during that time is immeasurable.
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Can t take it away, can they?
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So our topic today, we talked a little bit in the last episode about measuring dollars invested in anything.
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We talked about it in training.
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We talked about some of our approaches when we go into companies.
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But we thought it would be good today to talk about how do you
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best measure the value that you bring to your clients when they implement your solutions, whatever those solutions are.
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And so Brian has a little bit of, he s got a framework here.
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He s done the alliteration trick again, which he s really good at.
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I ve got something that I will introduce into the zeitgeist today.
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Oh, there we go.
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That you haven t heard.
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You ve heard one version of it.
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And I ve got something else that I want to introduce.
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Before we go any further, can you please explain to me, and maybe a few listeners, what a zeitgeist is, or what the zeitgeist is?
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Yeah, as I understand it, the zeitgeist is kind of the universe of proclamations and opinions.
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It s kind of like the culture of our world.
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If you put something in, it s like there for the mix, and it s all mixed in one big, soupy, slimy bowl of zeitgeist.
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I love it.
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I love it.
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If I m wrong on that, fact-checking Doug will correct me.
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He will tell you.
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We got a lot of, by the way, we did have some listeners who knew.
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I quoted a movie several weeks ago and several episodes ago where no one on the team knew what movie it was.
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And I said, when the light is green, the trap is clean.
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And I had a younger-ish listener, millennial, who texted me and said, it s Ghostbusters, right?
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I m like, way to go, man.
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Yes, it s Ghostbusters.
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when they catch the ghost in a little contraption, when the light is green, the trap is clean.
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But Doug did send that to me.
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And Doug sent it to me without looking it up.
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He knew, along with the year of the movie.
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Well, that s the thing about a fact checker.
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They shouldn t have to go to Google.
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I mean, what s the point?
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Doug, we re diminishing your role.
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No, I m kidding.
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Um, well this is, so measurement is such a, it s one of my favorite topics because it seems like it would be easy and it s not.
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That s why I love it so much.
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And I m also just personally wired for the scoreboard.
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I just love,
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the stats.
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I love the scoreboard.
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I love seeing what place I finish in.
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I just like that kind of feedback, that like hardcore feedback.
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And so all of you, I m guessing as a salesperson, at some point, if you haven t, you will.
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I m sure it s happened to everyone listening.
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have had a buyer who does an ROI analysis on what you sell.
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So if you sell software, we ve got to get an ROI.
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What s our ROI?
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ROI, ROI, ROI, ROI, ROI.
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You hear that over and over and over.
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And I think salespeople really struggle with what to do there.
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And then in the cases where you don t get the ROI question,
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and the person s kind of deciding whether or not to buy from you or not, then you re sort of working on this process, and it s sort of, you know, etheric, right?
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It s there, but it s not there.
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What does that mean?
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Etheric.
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So etheric would be, see, now the pressure s on, because I ve got to explain a big word that I use, and I hope I get it right.
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So etheric would be this sort of,
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More energetic, more in the energy and the ethos.
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How s that?
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I love when people use big words to define big words.
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That s close enough.
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Is that right?
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So not concrete.
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It s in the ether.
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Not concrete.
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It s in the air.
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Not concrete.
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How s that?
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Fair enough.
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So that s a thing.
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You forgot your point, didn t you?
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I did, yeah.
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So when people are looking for value, and the salespeople s trying to connect it, and it s not concrete.
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It s not like a number.
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You can t say, oh, if you plug this in, you will save $4 a month or whatever.
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It s not that concrete.
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So then it gets a little bit harder.
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So it s a tough, I m just saying, it s a tough thing to do.
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Yeah, I think what we ll do today maybe is not give you the answer, because the answer for every value prop is different.
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Every service is different.
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But to me, I look at this through two filters.
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One is there s the ROI of doing something versus not doing something.
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So a CPA firm contacts us and says, hey, Bill, Brian, we want you to come in and work with our CPAs for a year.
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And we re not closing enough business or whatever.
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So the idea there is there s an ROI of doing the training and coaching versus not doing it.
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If you did nothing, what would life look like?
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If you did this, what do you think life would look like?
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But then there s the, I m looking at you and four other vendors.
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And now, how do you assess the ROI between Brian and Bill and John and Harry and Sally?
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How do you do all that?
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Because that may be where most of our listeners are.
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And if your product is different enough,
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that you can distinguish the value that the customer gets, then I think you have a chance at talking about the different value and the ROI.
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If you re selling the exact same thing, I think it s hard to do.
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It s really hard to do.
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It really is.
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And that s where you have to go out to some of the other, if you go to past episodes, Bill and I have talked about demonstrating value in the levels of that.
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When you start in the middle and part of your product is commoditized, everybody s product is commoditized at its core in some way, shape or form.
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And then it moves out and there s the how you do it and why you do it.
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And that kind of moves out.
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Measuring is hard.
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So I have, I wrote down, and you like to do like three C s, three B s.
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This is me stealing a Bill Kaskyism, but it s three E s.
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It s E cubed when you re talking about how to determine measurement here.
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You want me to read all three of them to start with?
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Okay.
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So the three E s are economic, efficiency, and emotion.
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Economic, efficiency, and emotional.
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Those three things.
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When you re thinking of what you do and what you sell for a living, and someone s trying to figure out if it s worth it and how they re going to get a return and spending the money worth it, there s an economic element to that.
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There s an efficiency element to that, which like, how does it impact process and the way work flows?
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Then there s the emotional element to it, which is, does everyone feel happier and that sort of thing?
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And I think what people fail to do is they fail to hit all three of these things.
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They only hit usually the economic sometimes.
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If any.
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If any.
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That s a good point.
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That s a good point.
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And so I go ahead.
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So what are the economics?
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That s the dollars.
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That s the hard dollars, soft dollars.
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Yep.
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So again, easier in some places.
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So someone might say, if I plug in this sales enablement software, if I m a VP of sales, which a lot of you are, and I m buying sales enablement software.
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So I m buying salesforce.com or some version of that.
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what will my sales look like?
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So I m gonna plug it, I m gonna turn it on, and if I turn it on before I was doing a million a month, when I turn it on, maybe I m doing a million one a month, because of whatever Salesforce.com does.
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And so is it possible that economics, as I wrote down a similar thing here, not quite as clever as the E3, E3 cubed, and I think you need to give it a name.
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Should I, is it E cubed or E3 or 3E?
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I think E cubed, E3.
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is the hard and soft cost of economics.
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So there s the hard cost, which is you re going to be buying something, so you re going to slice a check for $1 million.
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That s a hard cost.
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And there s a hard return, which is I m going to generate an extra $12 million from the $1 million.
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So that s pretty hard and solid.
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But there s also a lot of soft costs, which may be some of those soft costs drift into your efficiency and emotion.
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If I m, maybe I ll be able to attract a higher level of person, salesperson, to my organization because our processes are all good.
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And so therefore, I grow my business another $5 million.
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But it s hard to say, if I do this, this happens.
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But a lot of times, that does happen.
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It s just indirect.
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Absolutely.
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Just softer indirect.
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And that s the problem.
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Maybe that s a better way to put it.
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I like that, yeah.
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And it s the, I don t think anyone, I hope you re not, don t be afraid of the scoreboard.
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So many salespeople, and I say scoreboard, not the internal scoreboard, how you re doing on sales, but the external scoreboard.
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So you want your clients to measure you and hold you accountable.
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I think that s really good.
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It cannot be one-to-one either way.
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Because the other thing you can t do.
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What do you mean by that?
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We can t take credit for all the good and be blamed for all the bad.
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Can t take credit for all the good or be blamed for all the bad.
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So if we plug in, I m using sales enablement software because it s easy because we have a lot of VP of sales that listen.
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You buy a new tool, sales enablement tool, and sales double.
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You know just happened to be the closest huge deal in that month that you turned it on That s not why and and the opposite is not why so if you lose a big deal It s not because you turned it on so you got to watch that.
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Yeah, so you re saying that be careful about attaching a whole lot of meaning to this because you can
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If your whole life is numbers, then you re going to get burned as much as you re going to win.
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And that s not really fair.
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So here s what I have.
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And I think this might help a person decide what to put underneath each of those three.
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Love it.
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And I have what I m just referring to here as the value journey.
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We ve heard about the customer journey, the buyer journey, and how many times we ve heard that.
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Lots.
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Lots and everybody has a slightly different way of defining it Oh gosh, but let s think about at some point the person buys they slice you a check.
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They sign a po they buy and My question is and i ve got a line here drawn across the page and i ve got some little asterisk above the line and some asterisk below the line the way you might think about this is above the line is the hard
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Economics and below the line and soft economics or soft measurements is what happens once I buy what happens well Number one our salespeople will be able to call 20% more people a day because it ll all be automated or whatever Okay, so over time.
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What does that equal if they make an average of 20 calls a day?
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That s five times 100 salespeople that s 5,000 calls a year that we re gonna get in because of that and
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So that s one data point.
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But you have to look at more than that.
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So what are all the things that could happen?
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And you ve got to let your possibilities run.
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And if you ve been representing your value, the service that you offer for more than a couple of years, you know what these things are.
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What are you hearing from the market?
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You know what?
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The reason I bought this, Brian, was because of the Salesforce component.
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But what I m finding is this is so much more powerful in helping our people do better research or whatever.
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Yes.
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I think if you start to document that value journey once a person buys and start to look at all the different things, how their life changes, it ll become a lot easier to come up with the economics, the efficiency, and the emotion.
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Absolutely.
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That s awesome.
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You know what s interesting about that is you can create your story around this concept of how to measure simply by asking your clients two questions.
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with your framework there, Bill.
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So why did you buy?
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And you give me an above-the-line answer and a below-the-line answer.
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So above-the-line, why did you buy for hard?
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And why did you buy for soft?
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And then why do you keep, so why do you keep paying me hard and soft, above the line, below the line answer?
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There s your story.
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And you ask five customers that, you re probably going to see a trend.
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You re talking about current clients.
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Current clients, current clients.
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Because then what you can do then is you can take what we re teaching you.
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That s better than all the other crap that people ask in surveys.
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And then you say, exactly.
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How would you rate us on a scale of one to seven?
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It s just, why did you buy?
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Yeah.
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What were you looking for?
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Hard, boom, and then soft.
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And then why do you keep us?
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Why do you keep renewing?
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Hard, soft, and then just repeat that to five different clients.
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And there s your story.
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You get all you need.
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And then when people ask you, how do I measure what you do?
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Say, glad the chest.
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Here s what we did.
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We asked them.
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Here s what their answers were.
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Hard, soft, hard.
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That s great.
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That s great.
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And then you capture some of those people on video talking about it.
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Value journey mapping.
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Value journey mapping.
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The old customer journey, a little tired.
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It s a little tired.
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A little worn out.
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And nobody knows what it is.
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It s amazing when you ask people.
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They love to throw that, well, we re going to journey map.
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We re going to value journey map.
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We re going to check the customer.
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We re going to journey map this.
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I m like, what is that exactly?
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You always get a different answer.
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Anyway, yeah, and the last, I wanna rub like a hard stamp this one.
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It s really important that you explore the emotional impact of what you do.
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Because there is culture meaning behind everything that anybody sells.
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I don t care what it is, as simple as it is.
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I ve got a client that sells semi-trailers.
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And you would think, what?
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Semi-trailer, da, da, da.
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Well, I was driving, taking my kid to his baseball game yesterday on Sunday afternoon, and I passed two of their customers.
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I passed one coming back from Kentucky.
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Yes, yeah.
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Well, and this was one of their customers that was a really well-branded semi-trailer.
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It s totally painted.
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It s logoed and everything else.
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And it s of their customers.
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Brand.
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Yeah, who we actually are going to start work with, too.
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So I m like, OK.
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And what s interesting is it s really nice looking.
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And so I know the owner.
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It s a family business.
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It s second generation.
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They re really proud people.
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And when you ask them about that, they are so proud to see their decal logo semi-trailer driving down the road.
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How much did that cost?
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Well, it cost them $2,000 to logo the trailer, and it cost them $350 to lease it every month.
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That s the hard stuff.
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But that emotional, man, you cannot.
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And it s with everybody.
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You see, what you re talking about there, though, or and, is not just the emotions of the prospect when they re buying.
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but it s the emotion of the client once they have you in.
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And they re proud of the fact that they ve brought you in.
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And the branding is good.
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And every time they see something come from you, it makes them more proud that they chose you as a vendor or whatever.
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And that s part of that customer experience, is what is the branding and emotional connection
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that you re helping your customer feel when they connect with you.
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And we as sales professionals are on the very front line of that.
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I mean, we impact that so dramatically.
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Steph at our shop here just had a conversation with someone that sold to her
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And she didn t buy from him because of some product things, so some things up in the efficiency economic side.
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But he did such a good job on this emotional front, impressing her with the sales.
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She s connecting with him on some other good stuff.
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So that sales professional left such an impact on her that she s trying to help and advance him further in some other things.
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That was a good lesson where he technically lost the deal because of the economic efficiency stuff.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, of the first two.
1
SPEAKER_00
But this is long tail.
1
SPEAKER_00
This emotional thing will pay him back through her connections that she s going to connect for him way past that one deal.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
So here s the assignment, is write down the three Es, economics, efficiency, and emotions, or emotional, and then draw a line across your page with the value,
1
SPEAKER_01
the value journey mapping so that you can understand where your value actually shows up.
1
SPEAKER_01
Hard cost at the top, soft or indirect cost at the bottom.
1
SPEAKER_01
An indirect value, not cost, but indirect hard results.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think it ll help you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And again, like you said, it would be great to go back to current clients and ask the question.
1
SPEAKER_01
Ask those two questions.
1
SPEAKER_00
And you ll get so much valuable data.
1
SPEAKER_00
Massive.
1
SPEAKER_00
That s a good one.
1
SPEAKER_00
You should listen to this over and over.
1
SPEAKER_00
VPs of sales, you should listen to this, too, and have your team do this whole deal.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s a really good one.
1
SPEAKER_00
All right, that s it.
1
SPEAKER_00
We will see you next time on the AdvanceLink Podcast.
1
SPEAKER_00
Bye.
1
SPEAKER_00
Bye.