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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Mrs. Kasky comes up with a brilliant idea to the Starbucks pay it forward dilemma.
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We riff on one of our least favorite foods, olives, and we take a listener question about how to keep positive deal velocity.
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Welcome, everybody, 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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And I m Bill Kasky.
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We are here every week for your listening enjoyment.
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Happy summertime.
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It s beautiful to move into summer, isn t it?
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I love it.
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I love the 75 degree.
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You know, if it gets up to 90, I have a problem with that.
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I just like 60, late, early, or early, mid 60s to mid late 70s.
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Yeah, Rolling Stones, Beatles, right.
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I know what you re saying.
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Now, we just got back, my wife and I went to Clearwater Beach, Florida.
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Wonderful place.
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I love Clearwater.
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Oh my gosh, it was wonderful.
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I was really impressed.
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I m not a big Florida fan.
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I was a little tired, a little old, the beaches.
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But man, Clearwater was awesome.
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So if you ve been to Clearwater, you re from down there, good for you.
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It s a great place.
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But it was humid.
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It s humid, like really humid.
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And running down there was like running underwater.
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And I went for a jog this morning, and I m like, what s happening?
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I can breathe.
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Yeah.
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It s really, really great.
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Clearwater is one of those hidden gems.
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Yes.
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I mean, you always think about Lauderdale and Miami and Orlando and even Tampa, although Tampa is near Clearwater, but Clearwater and St.
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Pete Beach.
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Yeah.
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A lot of memories.
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Nice pads there.
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Nice places.
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So, uh quick thing the letter I had a follow-up to my starbucks inline story where I was Kind of shy about accepting the drink that the person in front of me offered and very shy about paying for the dude behind me And my wife I got home and I told her about this.
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She goes, you know, why don t you just you should have tipped
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Barista five bucks.
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You didn t buy the you were too cheap to buy the $20 guy behind you But you should have at least picked five bucks out said here look here and then everybody would have been happy the guy behind me would have known right and the barista wouldn t have had the shame and he had to deal with the rest of the day of not being able to sell me on
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Did you go back and I did not but I go to that one all the time.
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And so I Need to do that.
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That s a really good idea down the middle.
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That s great.
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What a great idea So for everyone listening if that happens to you and you feel a little uncomfortable buying the $4,000 getting double espresso shots in the
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school bus behind you, you can just tip the barista 20 bucks and feel good about yourself.
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It was an SUV, and I assume there were kids in there, and they may have even been having an office party, although at that point nobody was in the office.
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My guess is if the kids were in the car, they got something.
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Usually at Starbucks, the kids get something.
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Which is funny, because my kids go and they get, can we get Starbucks?
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I m like, sure.
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And they go and they get this, it s like a vanilla mocha something.
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Mocha, no, matcha.
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Let me tell you what it really is.
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It s a freaking milkshake is what it is.
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It s like, why don t we go to Dairy Queen for breakfast?
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That would be just fine and get, you know, like a M&M s Blizzard.
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It s the same thing.
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I heard Vinny Tortorich, who s a fitness and health guy, he was on Adam Carolla s show the other day, and he said that they tested the sugar content of a Jamba juice, and it s like 90 whatever grams of sugar in those things.
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It s crazy.
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90.
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I mean, that s like three days worth.
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Yeah.
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And it s like, yeah, like 14 Snicker bars.
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No wonder they re good.
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All right topic topic we had a question that came in from actually it was from one of our insider People and they wanted us to talk about this on the next insider program And so we thought we d give you a little taste and you ve heard us talk about some of the coaching ideas and you ve heard us take listener questions before but I thought this was a good one and it s a good one because
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It s happening everywhere today.
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So here it is.
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Love the show.
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Super pumped about the Insiders program.
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Thanks for what you do.
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My question today keeps coming up in my deals.
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I am a salesperson for a small startup software company in the printing and packaging industry.
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Our software is quite revolutionary, and almost everyone we talk to is interested.
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Our typical process starts with some qualification discovery, during which we evaluate the fit of the customer.
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We share our process upfront, gain buy-in from the prospect that the pain we solve is a high priority.
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If it s a go, the next step is some kind of proof of concept, start to add a personal measure of success, blah, blah, blah.
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At this point, both parties agree on the value of the next step, and the client is excited.
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They have a small bit of homework to do to provide us with data for this POC, proof of concept, usually ahead of some date that we ve already set.
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Then, crickets.
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I will call, email them to remind them to send their required info with no response.
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The customer will even jump on our next meeting without having sent us the information we require to have the meeting in the first place.
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My question is, how do I keep the client focused on providing the necessary info needed to maintain the momentum?
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I love that.
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Very well done, especially when the client is busy.
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I don t have a name for this person.
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So I just thank you guys.
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I thought I put the name in there.
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So sorry.
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But anyway, the name is Bob.
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Some fellow or lady from the insider.
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Yeah.
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Someone like that.
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This is really good, there s a lot in this, I love this.
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So, you want us to riff on it a little bit?
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Yeah, let s riff.
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Yeah, so here s my kind of assessment of what s going on here.
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And I m reading a little, you say read the tea leaves, behind the tea leaves, what do you say with that?
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Do you say read the tea leaves?
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You say the dog that s not barking.
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Oh, are you serious?
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The dog that s not barking.
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The dog that s barking, it s easy, but there s always a dog out there not barking, and you have to understand that there s a dog not barking there.
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I wish my dog was it.
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It didn t bark and didn t do other things too.
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That s a callback.
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I want to hear about that sometime.
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Please now.
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Okay.
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If you say that your software is revolutionary,
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My guess is you re selling something that either doesn t exist or people haven t thought of much anymore or yet.
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And when that happens, I think you really have to examine how you re educating the buyer on what it is that you do.
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And it s real easy to get excited about a new idea
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and then be unable.
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You mean the prospect is excited?
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Yes, the prospect.
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So if someone comes in and says, I got this new podcasting software for you guys.
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Like, oh, cool.
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You know, da, da, da, da, da.
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And then when it gets down to it, we re like, you know what?
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We ve been doing this for 15 years.
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We got a system.
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It s working fine, even though that looks and sounds cool.
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Make sense?
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So I think you need to really examine how you re positioning that upfront and how you re educating the buyer about what it is and why your software is so revolutionary.
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Because there s something, there s a gap that s missing.
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There s something that s missing there.
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There s something that s not getting filled in.
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Otherwise, there wouldn t be a pause.
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That s my first little observation there to look deeper in to see, how am I teaching?
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Yeah, because yeah when I when I heard the term revolutionary not much is revolutionary.
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Yeah, not much is transformative.
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Yeah or transformational But that s not to say you don t have it and it but I I agree with you But here s the thing that I was thinking about as I was listening to you.
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Yeah
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is that at some point, someone has to pull a trigger.
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In order for change to occur, change must occur.
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So if a prospect really wants what you have, evolutionary or revolutionary or not, they re going to have to make a change.
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And making a change is not a trigger to be pulled.
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It s a process to work through.
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Yes.
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And I think sometimes we have to make sure in our sales process, and it sounds like you have the caller, the listener has a really good sales process.
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Sounds like they re buttoned up about it.
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But is there anything in there that addresses the difficulty with change?
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Because if there s not, if it s all about you making the sale,
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And it doesn t sound like it is, so we don t know the details of this.
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But I would say make sure there s something in there.
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I was talking to a client the other day, and they had a similar kind of deal where crickets would ensue and just nothing would happen.
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And I said, how much of a conversation are you having late in the process about whether you should even do this or not?
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Are we going down the right track?
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What happens if you decide to abort this process and do nothing?
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What would happen?
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And if you re not asking that question, then I think that is an option for the person when they re sitting in a meeting, getting ready to sign the order or whatever, there s always that option of not doing something, doing nothing.
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Correct.
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Doing nothing s an option.
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Got to explore it.
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I m going to change.
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So in the email there, it says POC, correct?
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Yeah.
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POC, which we know stands for proof of concept.
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Well, I didn t know that.
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I d forgotten.
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Yeah, yeah.
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But yeah, it s a proof of concept.
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I m going to change.
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the words.
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See how defensive I was there?
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Because before we started, I said, what is POC?
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And you said proof of concept.
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I didn t want you to think, oh, now Bill acts like he knows what proof of concept is.
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No, no, no.
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No, I wasn t going to let that.
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It s OK.
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It doesn t matter.
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Let that out.
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We all have those.
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Go ahead.
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And I m going to change proof of concept, POC.
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Instead, it s going to mean from now on proof of commitment.
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Proof of commitment.
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So I want the buyer
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to demonstrate some proof to this individual that they are committed to going through the process and doing all that s necessary to get the revolutionary software installed.
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And if you don t have proof of commitment, you can t have proof of concept.
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That s good.
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P-O-C.
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P-O-C-1, P-O-C-2.
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P-O-C-2.
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P-O-C-1 is proof.
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I like proof of concept.
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Absolutely.
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I think that s part of it.
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But concept without commitment is like olives without peanut butter.
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I hate olives.
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I do too.
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Oh my God.
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Who likes olives?
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One of our listeners have to like olives.
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I always ask him to be taken off my salad.
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I just can t.
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And then the other day, somebody in our group got a pizza and they got like extra olives and I m like a pizza with extra olives?
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See, that s weird.
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You like that?
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The only thing I like
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olives on, but it s got to be the looks, like everything on it.
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You know what I mean?
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When it s kind of mixed together.
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Oh, you can t taste anything.
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Anything else, like a salad.
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Like a raw olive.
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And you have friends, have friends that just literally, they ll get a jar of olives, and just eat them one at a time.
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I refuse to be friends with those people.
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So, do you have anything else?
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I have one more.
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Yeah, let s go with yours, and I ll come up with something.
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And the last one is super tactical.
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If, as part of your process, and I m making an assumption here, but the assumption may only be 98% right, that this, we talked about, well, this looks like a buttoned up sales process, but where something s not happening in between there.
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And so number one, we have to make sure we are putting dates and milestones along the way.
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But if someone needs to be getting data put together, I don t know a soul on the earth who hears that and goes, oh, awesome.
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We love assembling data.
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It s one of our favorite things.
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I get some music.
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I get some creative music.
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I get a cigar and some nice wine.
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Yeah.
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Honey, honey, guess what?
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We get to put some data together.
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Yeah.
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We get to put together all of our tax returns for six years.
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This is awesome.
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So I think it s important to help the process there in some way, shape, or form.
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At minimum, I think you should put little check-in milestones in front of people, even just to say, hey, at this point, you should have pulled the first two reports out.
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Or at this point, if we re on target, you should have done this.
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It s kind of like almost a little mini accountability thing back to the customer.
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It just is a gentle reminder or a nudge instead of saying, okay, you re going to get all that stuff together and then we re going to talk on two Thursdays from now and there s nothing in between.
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And then they have the call and then they show up like, oh, sorry, we didn t get to all that stuff.
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You need to know their progress along the way.
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There needs to be a little progress thing.
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What s the Apple thing?
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I love the little line that kind of fills in and you never know if it s actually moving, but it is.
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Like there s so many little pixels, you re like, did it move?
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It didn t move.
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And then you get really close to it.
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Totally.
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It s like, is that moving?
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Then it gets to the very end, and you re like, OK, it s stuck.
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It s good.
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Sometimes it sticks at the end.
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It does, doesn t it?
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All right.
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OK, so the last thing I had here is, I think today, as my least favorite saying, in this day and age,
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I think you ve got to try things.
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And if your process is not working the way it used to, things change.
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The market changes.
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The landscape changes.
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People change.
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I know there s human nature that s probably never going to change.
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But it does start to tweak, especially when we re in situations like we re in now.
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So you might just have to change your process.
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Alter it.
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Tweak it.
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Try something new.
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If it doesn t work any better than the old, you can always go back.
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You always have permission to go back.
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But I don t think we change things enough.
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If we have a process, we kind of live with it.
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Well, today, you might have to alter it.
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And I like proof of concept, or proof of commitment, because I think right now, people are going to be shy with pulling triggers.
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Not all, not in every business, but some are.
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And if you re calling on a market that might be a little shy and scrutinize a decision a little bit, you re going to have to change the process.
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Yeah, for sure.
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Good question.
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Great question for whoever that was, the nameless person from The Insider.
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And you know all about The Insider.
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If you go to our website, you ll look up at the top banner there.
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There s actually a new video, a new video alert there that you can watch that tells you all about what you get if you become a member of The Insider.
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We really, really hope that you do consider that.
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And that s it.
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See you next time on the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Bye.