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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill unsuccessfully stumps me with a production question.
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I, however, stumped the crew with a movie quote from a super popular movie, and we talk about retooling your post-COVID sales story.
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That s always fun, isn t it, though?
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Here we go.
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Do you know why they do that?
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Yeah, so they can match up the audio.
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I thought you had me there, didn t you?
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I did.
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I did.
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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 Brian Neal.
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I m Bill Kasky.
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Bill just gave me a little gotcha.
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I love when people do that.
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He did.
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It was great when they say, well, do you know why?
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And I go, yeah.
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No, I was just making sure you knew.
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I love when, yeah, so I did the old clap.
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And then they do that in movies.
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They do that little snap thing.
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Scene one, take two, and they do that.
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Bill said, do you know why they do that?
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And the tone of his question made me think that he thought I didn t know, and I do know.
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Well, it did.
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Which is funny.
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Exactly.
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Which I really love.
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And I just quoted a movie, and no one in this building, I ve got one, two, three, four, five human beings plus me in this building, did not know what quote or what movie this quote came from.
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The light is green, the trap is clean.
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Doug Drozen, who s our fact checker, fact checker Doug,
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reached out to him in a while.
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We need you to tell us, Doug, without looking it up, preferably.
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Well, that s the thing.
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Doug always goes and looks up on Wikipedia, which is fine.
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Exactly.
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The light is green.
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The trap is clean.
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It used to be that fact-checking was a real art before Google came along.
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Now it s all fact-checking.
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But we still love you, Doug Drozen, because you are still
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Our fact checker, still a member of the Advanced Selling Podcast Tribe.
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You ve heard us talk about this.
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We mentioned last episode that the program we have running now where Bill and I can actually do live coaching with you called the
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Advanced Selling Podcast Insider group.
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And you can join that.
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You go to advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Today s episode, we re going to tee up our topic for August.
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So our topic in August is going to be how to retool or recraft your messaging.
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Because with all these shifts in the economy and in the markets and in our businesses, there s been a huge, huge shift in almost everyone s business across the board.
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And most people are still rolling around town with the same messaging.
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And that is no bueno.
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No bueno.
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That means no good, Bill.
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I took Aladdin.
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I think it means no good.
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Now, see, someone s going to... They re going to... Yeah, it does.
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Does it mean no good?
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I think it does.
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Okay.
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But I knew that.
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Let s go ahead.
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I m going to go ahead.
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That was hilarious.
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I thought that was funny.
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Thought I had him.
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Probably going to be.
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But he slipped out of my fingertips.
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The light is green, the trap is clean, still rolling.
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So let s talk about what, so we re going to think about this as like a tee up for that episode, for that advanced, or for the Advanced Selling Podcast Insider Group.
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We re going to go deep on this topic.
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For today s episode, we re just going to tease it a little bit, right Bill?
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Just kind of talk about that.
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So maybe we can divide this into a couple of, because I can imagine that people listening, some people who are listening are literally selling the exact same thing, but maybe in a slightly different way.
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Because the markets have changed, how you go about doing business, you re not showing up like you used in the pre-show.
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If you re a public speaker, and that s where you generated a million dollars a year, you got to figure out another way.
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So you re still selling the same thing, but the how you deliver it has changed.
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But the other side of that is what if you have reconfigured your offer
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what you sell.
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So I think those are two different things that could be happening.
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And maybe there s a section in the middle of people where we ve had to reconfigure and people aren t buying it the same way.
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Yeah, there s no doubt.
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And I think it s one or the other or both.
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I haven t found too many businesses where one of those isn t true.
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I can t think of a business that I work with where either the offering hasn t changed or the buying condition of their prospect hasn t changed.
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Very, very rarely I think is that going on across the board.
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So I m sure someone s going to chime in and say, no, no, my business, everything s like business as usual.
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I m just not, I don t know.
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I think that might be a myth.
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So this should apply to anybody, whether or not your buyer s condition has changed or your condition has changed or both, all this should apply to you.
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And we re going to talk about the today, the development of the messaging, what to do to start to recraft it.
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And then there s a delivery element to this that in the insider group, we re actually going to talk about in September.
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It s been august crafting september practicing how to deliver that.
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So I ve got three little tidbits written down here bill.
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Yeah, well I ll uh, i ll go for I don t this really applies to both but and that is the I think there s uh, who was I talking to the other day and they said, you know, we we want you to I don t really want to work on messaging that much.
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I think we re pretty clear on the message and I thought well
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But it all changed.
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It all changed March 25th or whatever.
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Absolutely.
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And I think it s not serving your company and your sales team, this was a VP of sales, serving your company well by saying, we don t need to worry about the messaging.
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We re good on that.
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We ve been good on that for the last 27 years.
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Well, it s changed.
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It is changed.
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And so number one, I would say, is get crystal clear on your ideal prospect s current circumstances.
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What are their current conditions, current operating conditions?
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Maybe they re under the gun.
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Maybe they are struggling with the same things you re struggling with, like how do we do business with our customers?
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So get really clear on what their current business circumstances are.
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Because the circumstances are where all the pains and problems and anxieties are located.
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But don t start with problems.
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Start with just circumstances.
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Well, they re not sure what to do next.
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A high percentage of their business is in automotive, and that s dying.
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So they re going to have to figure out another thing.
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Look at circumstances.
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Absolutely.
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That s good.
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And a tactical thing to do there also, I think some people make this mistake.
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They think that everyone s been impacted negatively.
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And that is not the case.
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There are a lot of industries and businesses within industries that have been impacted positively.
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And they have a different set of circumstances.
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So make sure when you re doing this, you literally take, I love what Bill said, you literally take a piece of paper and you write down either the industry itself and or the specific customer.
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by name and say, let s plus minus how this whole COVID deal and new economy stuff has impacted them, and then start to think about our version of that.
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So it s really, really good.
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Yeah.
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So the thing you added to that was the pluses, too.
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The pluses, too.
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Correct.
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It s not only negative, because maybe there s hidden opportunities that they may not even have thought about that you can.
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Absolutely.
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For sure.
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Yep.
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So then I wrote down, which takes that thing
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I guess it s an element of, I m calling this a bridge, a bridge statement, is I want to make sure that as I m crafting my story, that within the new positioning statement, I ve got some direct connection to those things.
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Because I think what people fail to do sometimes is they do these separately.
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They work on their stuff.
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and they work on the customer stuff, and they don t do a good job of connecting the two.
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And so make sure as you re developing and crafting your new story that there s a direct connection.
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So you re starting to make this, you re starting to sketch out a storyline.
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Here s what happened in your world that we, as we understand it, here s what happened in our world, and here s what we ve done, boom, and now I m doing a connection.
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Make sure there s some sort of bridge statement in your story.
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A lot of people forget that.
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They just make sure, they think everyone s gonna assume and put it together, and then they don t.
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They don t.
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Yeah, that s really good.
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That s good.
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I think there s a second thing I had here was...
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There is going to be, in your customer s business, and in your business too, a reinvention of the vision.
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And I think if you say, well, we ve had a vision on the board for the last three years, we ll just let that suffice, I don t think that s the best way to do it.
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It could be that when you start paying attention to your vision, and this, by the way, could apply to you individually as a sales professional too, what do your next five years look like?
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Well, I didn t want my income to double over the next three years.
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Now I don t know.
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Well, keep it there.
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But maybe there s another way you re going to get to it.
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So I think this idea of reimagining the vision is a good exercise to go through for your company, for you personally, and also your clients.
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Their visions might have been destroyed, or at least the clear path to the vision has been destroyed.
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And sometimes it s good just to go back and check in with them and see how they are
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rethinking where they want to go.
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What do they really want in the market now?
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Because I ll bet you it s changed.
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That s a great.
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And that, to me, makes you valuable as a salesperson.
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Or most salespeople are thinking, like, how can I hang onto this, save it, get something closed in this time of uncertainty?
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Or that raises the value of your relationship with those people, is to ask them things and help facilitate the conversation.
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Like, we never thought about that.
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Yeah.
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My last thing here is you re developing a story.
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Don t forget the core components of a really good story.
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They all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they re interesting along the way.
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Story s interesting, beginning, middle, and end.
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An easy framework for that is here s where we were, here s where we are, here s where we re going.
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And be okay saying, when we started this whole thing, here s where we were, here s where we are.
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And then the whole thing changed.
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So since then, we ve done this process.
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We ve whiteboarded.
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Now here s where we are now.
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Here s where we were.
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Here s where we are.
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Here s where we re going.
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That s really nice framework for you that will fill in the words for you as we work on the craft.
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And we do this with the Insider Group.
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But that s a really good framework for you.
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That s really good.
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I was just thinking about a quote that I heard a few weeks ago where, and it was,
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You ve heard the saying, nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
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You ve heard that before.
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Well, this guy had a very different, I wish I could attribute it to somebody.
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It was a guy.
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Is that breaking down?
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Yeah, we ve got about half the planet.
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It s an American guy.
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So we re down to about 1 in 3.5 billion.
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Keep going.
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It was a guy who said, people don t care what you know.
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They care where you re going to take them.
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And that s exactly what you re talking about, is here to there.
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Here s where I am today.
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Here s where I want to go.
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Can you, as a salesperson, help me get there?
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Are you going to be a strategic partner along this path that I m about to go down?
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Or, and sometimes I think you can just show up and say, look, this is where my train is going.
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This is what we re going to be doing, and this is where we re taking our clients.
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If you want to hop on the train, awesome.
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If you don t, that s fine too.
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Train s going there regardless.
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That is phenomenal.
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If you want any theme around this whole thing, you need to create certainty for others in your message.
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Because everybody s looking for certainty.
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They re looking for a train to get on that they know where it s going.
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And so many people are like, we re not sure.
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No one likes that.
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No one likes that.
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Wall Street doesn t like it.
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People don t like it.
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Let me know where we re going, I love that.
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It s the, you know, when you see a bus, city bus, well, the red line.
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Can we talk?
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We re close.
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Yeah, well, we can go count the people that are on the red line if you want to.
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I think we can guess.
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I always said.
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Less than five.
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If you find more than eight, I ll give you $100 at rush hour.
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But yeah, like the bus or the train, it s got the destination on the top there in the front.
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And where are you taking people?
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And if you don t know, because you don t know where you re going, how do you expect people to board your train?
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They can t.
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They can t.
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They can t.
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All right, that s good.
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So go to advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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You can join our insider tribe right there.
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You go to click on the information that talks about our insider group.
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We ll be talking about this in much more depth in our August and both August and September sessions.
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So hope to find you there.
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And we will see you next time on the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Bye.