This is a common response many people hear from prospects when making sales calls. It’s those passive dismissives that often get thrown back at you at the end of a call to politely tell you – “we’re not interested.”
One story in particular that Ari shares is the time he made a sales call to an executive team of a large company. In Ari’s words “there was so much chemistry in that call it was like a love-fest!” By the end of the call, Ari was convinced he had made the sale. He had followed every step in the classic sales cycle… building rapport, handling objections, the close etc.
At the end of the call, the prospect said “Ari this is great we love it! Look, give us a call in a couple of weeks. Follow up with us and we’ll move this thing forward.” Ari thought he’d hit a home run. But in a twist of fate, he didn’t hang up the call properly and unintentionally got to listen in on the prospect’s conversation in the board room moments later. In essence, they made the call not to work with him, but to use him for information and engage with a cheaper vendor.
This was the pivotal moment that drove Ari to look at a new way of selling. A way that brought trust and honesty back into the sales process.
Ari began to shift his mindset away from focussing on the sale and rather building trust with qualified prospects. It set the foundation for the next 20 years of his professional career. Unlock The Game is the result of Ari’s transformative approach to selling based on trust, integrity and authenticity.
The number one goal is not to promote your product, brand or solution – but rather focus in on, and understand the problem your prospect is trying to solve. It is only then, when you have demonstrated your genuine concern for the problem your prospect is trying to solve, that you have the trust needed to offer a solution.
According to Ari, there has been “a brewing revolt against traditional sales methods for a long long time. for a long long time. People have been burnt, rejected, taken advantage of for years, and they know at ‘Hello’ when you’re in that game [or not]. Trust-based selling is a response to traditional sales methods. Individuals and organizations genuinely want to partner with and purchase from people they trust. Many times, people already know what their problem is and what solutions or products they should be considering. In a world where every product looks the same, what buyers are looking for is someone they trust to deliver the solution for them.
Ari says it this way: “They don’t really care about how you solve [their problem] – they just care about whether you’re the one to solve it or not.”
For sales people and business owners who have read all the sales books over the years, such a paradigm shift to you sales approach might be hard to process. If this is the case, Ari offers three myths about sales that might help re-program your thinking.
Myth #1 – Sales is a Numbers Game
This idea permeates the sales world. It’s been around since the 1980s and came from the idea that the more contacts you make, the more sales you make. What Ari and his team have discovered is that in the new economy, it’s not about how many contacts you make anymore. It’s about how deep you go on each conversation. The emphasis is no longer how good you are and how many phone calls you make.
Myth #2 – The Sale is Lost at the End of the Process.
Traditional sales methodology suggests a sale is lost at the end of the process. That you didn’t nail your close, or you mishandled an objection. What Ari has discovered is that in the new economy the sale is not lost at the end of the process but rather at the beginning. At “Hello.”
Myth #3 – Rejection is a Part of the Sales Game.
Traditionally, based on a numbers approach to sales, rejection HAD to be a part of the sales process. The old attitude was to suck it up and grow a thick skin. That’s just what happens in sales. What Ari discovered in his research is that rejection only happens when we lose trust with our prospect. There are certain things we do and say in the process that force the prospect to put up their guard.
Ari suggests that when you enter a sales call, you should do so armed with an inventory of the two or 3 problems that your organization solves. then you begin the conversation acknowledging the problems your prospect is experiencing. Peeling back the layers on these problems and showing empathy for the situation, means you can begin to talk about the ROI for solving the problem and the impact that NOT solving the problem might have on the business.
There is a point in the conversation at which Ari identifies a key question that needs to be asked: “Is this a priority for you?” He is so intentional with this question that when describing it to us, he said every word with a period! Is. This. A . Priority. For. You?
Ari describes the conversation to be similar to a therapist and their patient. A patient who doesnot acknowledge they have a problem (or doesn’t want to fix it!) is the worst patient to have. So ownership is an important part of this process.
There is one phrase that is only used in the world of sales. “Follow-up.” “I’m calling to follow-up.” “I just wanted to follow up on our conversation last week.” “Hi, this is just a follow-up call.” Ari suggests this puts the prospect in a defensive frame of mind, where they may feel on the back foot or taken off guard. Rather than the words, “follow-up,” Ari invites salespeople to shift their language. “Hi, I’m calling to ask if you have any feedback on our last conversation? Any feedback on our last meeting? Any feedback on the last email?”
The purpose of asking for feedback is to elicit the truth. You are going to determine whether or not you are a good fit to do business together. They are going to raise their concerns if they have any, or they are going to talk about their thoughts around next steps.
Most of the thoughts and ideas Ari shares in this podcast seem antithetical to the way you have always learned to approach sales. For this reason, we encourage you to listen in to this conversation and hear Ari talk more about why Trust-Based Selling is so crucial in the new economy.
A little more about David Jenyns:
After 17 years working IN his business, David systemised himself out of his company (Melbourne SEO & Video) and hired a CEO to run it. Through this process, David became a systems devotee, went on to found systemHUB.com and started a movement called SYSTEMology.
Today, David's mission is to free business owners worldwide from the day-to-day operations of running their business.
The Waymaker Way is a simple mantra that guides our philosophy toward business leadership and success.
Show the way
Build the system
Train the leader
Hold them accountable
Help them win
In this episode, we explore the first three of these and the lessons we can learn from Shackelton's journey.
Possibly the most important attribute of a leader in hard times is resilience, and resilience is the art of knowing who you are and staying the course when the @#$%^ hits the fan! How do I build resilience? What questions should I be asking myself?
Purpose - why do we exist?
Perceptions - what does the market believe about us?
Position - Where am I positioning in the market
Practices & Proposition - is my yes a yes and my no a no?
Personalities - how do we look, feel and communicate? Is it consistent with our principles?
Principles - what do we believe?
When the wind changes direction, how do we learn to set a better sail?
For more gold on leading in hard times, download our resource “5 Leadership Plays” from Waymaker.io
Waypoints and Scorecards give a powerful way to see and forecast expected performance against actual performance. They help surface insights for coaching and mentoring of individuals from their leaders on the way to success.
Use Waypoints to create a forecast set points to journey towards. And, then use Scorecards to collaborate with team members on the tracking to outcomes that matter within the organization.
Waymaker exists to help leaders and teams build a better a better business with clarity, alignment, and focus on the actions that matter most.
The Waymaker Leadership Curve is a way to make sense of what growth stage you are in as a business. It objectively identifies which skills are needed to get to the next stage of growth and what systems are needed to scale those skills to the highest value. Not only this, it helps you track growth over time, in the key areas of your business.
Business Development, Sales, marketing & service, people & culture, Leaders and leadership development.
If you choose to implement Waymaker as your strategic planning and execution platform you will have a powerful command center to build a better business by making business improvement, business as usual.
Visit https://waymaker.io/leadership-development/ for more information.
The Waymaker Leadership Curve is a way to make sense of what growth stage you are in as a business. It identifies which skills are needed to get to the next stage of growth and what systems are needed to scale those skills to the highest value. Not only this, it helps you track growth over time, in the key areas of your business.
Business Development, Sales, marketing & service, people & culture, Leaders and leadership development.
If you choose to implement Waymaker as your strategic planning and execution platform you will have a powerful command centre to build a better business by making business improvement, business as usual.
Visit https://waymaker.io/leadership-development/ for more information.
At Waymaker we know that you want to be a transformational leader. To do that you know you need to find and deliver the highest value activities in the fastest possible way, every quarter.
The problem is with everything moving so fast you end up stuck in the driver’s seat doing too much and with no time to think or plan how to build a better business.
We believe strategic agility is the key to building a better business in the midst of chaos.
We know building a better business is hard, which is why we developed a platform that helps you find your breakthrough and start building a better business in 30 days or less.
You can take our course on moving from Reactive Chaos to Strategic Agility in our Waymaker Academy, when you sign up for a Free 30 day trial at Waymaker.io
The reality is that most meetings suck. The problem is that they are a reality of the modern organization. The solution however is not found in better scheduling, better technologies, or even better software to facilitate meetings remotely. Meetings are better when we understand WHY we meet. In this episode, Stu and Craig discuss the WHY, and how the new Meetings Module inside Waymaker helps make meetings great again.
Waymaker Meetings helps you set up and schedule the right kinds of meetings - the ones your organization needs to have. It then helps you run them in such a way that you focus on and do the right things. If that's not helpful enough - Waymaker Meetings uses sophisticated AI to take the minutes of your meeting and share those notes with your team - identifying the action items and gives your team lazer focus on the job to be done.
Spend less time running meetings and more time achieving goals.
Waymaker Meetings helps you:
For more information visit https://waymaker.io
We are in a series of episodes discussing the 5 roadblocks business need to navigate in order to build a successful business.
Plan
Lead
Sell
Employ
Work
Waymaker CX helps you go from stalled to scaled in 12 sessions over 12 weeks - building your own unique Go-to-market playbook to empower your team to sell more, more easily. With Waymaker CX you'll learn:
- How to unify sales, marketing, service, and technology to sell smarter & faster.
- How to find the growth gaps in your customer strategy.
- How to align your team to focus on highest priority sales improvement tasks every quarter.
- How to articulate the ideal customer who will buy from you time and time again.
- How to find the gaps in competitors and exploit them with your strengths and advantages.
- How to build the must have communication messages to attract & close the most valuable clients.
- How to design a customer journey that delights & buyer’s journey that closes with speed & simplicity.
- How to build your own sales method that makes teaching your team how to be sales rockstars a breeze.
- How to create your own innovation cycle that releases your team to make business improvement, business as usual.
When we talk to leaders, we often hear the same frustration. There is so much information out there on what you need to do to be a better leader - but not much that tells you how to be a better leader today, in your world.
You go to the conferences, you read the books, you get motivated and inspired - but you don’t get contextual steps for real, actionable, measurable steps to growth.
We've experienced the same thing. And we thought to ourselves, "Hang on, we’ve developed this amazing technology to show people how to build a better business. Why not use the same engine to help people become better leaders?
If you simply want to develop leaders with real skills, while working on real outcomes - then Waymaker will show you the way. We're excited to talk on this episode about our new Waymaker Leadership Diagnostic.
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