Ian Altman 00:04 

Hi, it's Ian Altman. Welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast, your source for integrity based sales and marketing that can really help to grow your business. I'm joined by the talented, brilliant Meridith Elliott Powell. And Meridith, can you give people a little bit of your background, so they have some idea of, other than just my endorsement, why they should listen to you? 

Meridith Elliott Powell 00:28

Well, I think your endorsement is pretty powerful, but I am a business growth and sales strategist, and my passion is helping my clients turn all of this uncertainty into their competitive advantage.

Ian Altman 00:40 

And, of course, Ian Altman, many of you know me through the book, Same Side Selling, and oftentimes people call on me because they have trouble standing out from the competition, they get stuck being treated as a commodity all about price, and they want to see how to unpack that and sell more on the results side rather than price. Today, what we're focused on, is something that is near and dear to my heart, which is practice. See top performing athletes, do you think they practice more or less than the mediocre athletes? And of course, top performing musicians, same thing, the top performing ones practice more than the average performers. But, when it comes to sales professionals, they have many, many excuses for why they don't need to practice. What are some of the things that you hear from people as their explanation for why they maybe don't need to practice? 

 Meridith Elliott Powell 01:35

Well, I think one of the biggest ones is, just, I was just doing some sales training, and when we got to the roleplay part, people just said, “Well, we hate to roleplay, and if we hate to roleplay, we shouldn't have to roleplay.”

Ian Altman 01:49

And, and so, so when they say, “I don't like to roleplay,” what do you think that is? What, what is it about the roleplay that they don't like? 

Meridith Elliott Powell 01:58

Well, I think that people worry that they’ll be a little embarrassed. I think they worry they're going to be judged, and I think all of a sudden, we're gonna know they're not really good at the sales conversation. Because, if you can't do it with one of your buddies you work with, I really question how good are you in front of a customer? 

Ian Altman 02:17 

You know, I love that. The way I often describe it as this, “So, it would be uncomfortable if you did this with a colleague of yours, because, I guess you'd rather screw it up when it really counts with a real client, right?” Because, we don't want to make the mistake in the safety of our own office, or over a Zoom call with somebody else, where if we get it wrong, we get to say, “Oh, I didn't do that right. Let's start over.” Because you can't do that with a prospect. You can't say,” Oh, you know what? I shouldn't have said this. I meant to say that instead. So, can we just rewind this meeting and start over?” It doesn't work that way. And if you were, if you were a golfer, and because I know you and I both play golf, so for anybody who's not, not a golfer and you're listening to this, just bear with us for a second. We're not going to recount every shot we hit in our last round, because that's something that golfers often do. But, if all of a sudden you took a golf lesson and learned a new bunker shot on Saturday, if you were playing on Sunday morning in a match that mattered, what's the likelihood you're going to use that new swing you just learned yesterday?

Meridith Elliott Powell 03:24

Not likely, unless I spend some time in the middle, in the bunker, practicing like crazy to get it down. Because, I love the fact that you said that, because that is like going to sales training and thinking you can come out and use what you just learned. I mean, I go to a golf lesson, and if, I just know I need to spend the next week on the course, working on what I was just taught, because it's not ingrained in me yet. 

Ian Altman 03:51 

Exactly. And so, that’s, that's the area that I think that people often overlook. So, the first one is this notion of it could be uncomfortable. So, of course it's uncomfortable to practice with somebody else. There is that potential for embarrassment, like you pointed to, and we don't want our friends and colleagues to know that maybe we're not as good in that situation. But, we're much better off having that experience with them, and figuring it out. And, guess what? You're going to learn from each other also. So, you're going to see things that someone else did that you think, “Oh, that's a good idea. I should try that in my meetings.” And you're going to hear things that you say, “Oh, that sounds awful. And you know what? I say that too. So now, I want to make sure I don't say that anymore.” I think that, that's an aspect that is often lost on people. So, that first one is that idea of embarrassment. The other one that I hear a lot, Meridith, I don't know how often you hear this, is people who say, “Well, sure, I would practice but we just don't have time.” Do you hear that often?

Meridith Elliott Powell 04:51

Oh, yeah, sure. Definitely. Definitely hear that one. You know, my husband is a dentist, and a few years back he had asked me to come in and do some work with this team. Now, I really vowed I would never be the wife of the dentist who came in and did anything, but then it occurred to me that my financial benefit lies in this too. So, I set it up. I said on one condition. I said, once a month, your team is going to roleplay, and we got them to a well-oiled machine. And, they complained about it all the time. They never had the time. They were too busy with patients. But, we carved it out. They became a well-oiled machine. The moment we quit roleplaying, the wheels came off the bus. 

Ian Altman 05:31 

Yeah, absolutely. And, I think that's an important element of this, which is, the people who roleplay, if you roleplayed an hour a week, so there's, there's a, there's a game that we have in the Same Side Selling Academy, called Same Side Improv. The idea behind Same Side improv is that, you pick cards from, from a, from a deck, and the person who's playing the customer takes on that role. So, you might pull out a card that says you don't trust vendors, or you're seeking free information, or there's like, you know, 30 different cards that you can you pick from, and then you play that role. And, if you practice for an hour a week doing that, do you not think that you'll save at least an hour a week in productivity and efficiency? Of course you will. And to your point, it's interesting, we had a client of mine who they would, they were amazing, this group, they went from 20% to 95% of their team hitting their numbers in one year. The single greatest reason, I believe, they did that is, not necessarily the things that I taught them, or they learned in terms of Same Side Selling, but it was the fact that they were meticulous and vigilant about practicing for an hour week, every single person. In fact, it was part of their comp. plan. If they didn't do that, they actually missed out on a bonus. So, there was, there was a portion of a percentage that if they practice for an hour a week and it was confirmed, then they got an extra half a percent on their sales. And if they didn't, they didn't get that, which I thought was brilliant. And, it was interesting, because they had one group in the organization who, everyone was performing well, they're all going the same trajectory, and this one group kind of fell off, and had plateaued. And I said, “Well, so what kind of problems you're running into?” And, they were describing them. I said, “Well, how do those play out when you do improv each week?” And the manager of that group says, “Oh, well, you know, we actually stopped doing improv”. And I said, “Well, do you think that has something to do with it?” He says, “Well, no, because, because, I mean, this, this stuff started happening four months ago.” I said, “Okay, and when did you guys stop with your weekly improv?” He goes, “Oh, it was probably like five or six months ago” It was just, and the funny part was that it wasn't obvious to him what he was saying. It was like, no, no, we already got good enough at it, so we don't need to practice anymore. And, I think, that's the great misnomer that's out there is that either, well I practiced for two weeks and that's enough or, well, once we get good enough, we don't need to practice anymore. And, in every other industry, it doesn't work that way.

Meridith Elliott Powell 08:05 

It doesn't. Oh, my goodness. You know, it's, we've talked so much about, about athletes, and we have a guy here in town who, who made it to Wimbledon, he actually played with, with Agassi. And, when you talked about, so, he was on the tour for years, and good enough to be on the tour, get the retirement and everything from the tour. So, he played in the top 50 for years. The amount of time he practiced versus he played was just unbelievable. I mean, he would get in, he would fly into someplace, he would land and immediately go to the tennis courts. He never saw any place he visited in the world, because he would practice from the time he got there. Before a match, he and the rest of the pros, they show up three and four hours early and just get grooved into doing what they need to do. And we're talking about an hour a week. 

Ian Altman 08:59

Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's the fascinating part. So, there's a fellow speaker, I don't know if you know, Alan Stein Jr. So, so, Alan tells a story about, so, he was a basketball performance and training coach for years, and he was involved in the late Kobe, Kobe Bryant's camps with Nike. And so, he went to an event that that Kobe was at and he said, “Hey, I'd love to come out to your training session tomorrow morning.” And Kobe says, “Well, you know, I'm just gonna let you know that we start early. It starts at 5:30 in the morning.” He's like, man, I don't want to mess this thing up. He said, so I made sure to get there early, and I showed up at 5 A.M. He said, and Kobe is on the court in a full sweat already. And, what Kobe was doing was fundamental basics that they teach these kids. The same thing they were teaching high school and early college athletes, th is is what he was doing in these exercises. And, Alan tells the story beautifully, and he says, he says to Kobe, “Well, so Kobe, you're doing this really basic drill.” He said he was doing it with amazing precision, amazing velocity, but just, but just this very basic drill. He says, “You're arguably one of the greatest players in the world, but you're doing this basic drill.” He says, “Well, how do you think I became that level of a player?” It’s because he's practicing those fundamentals over and over. 

And, it's interesting, because what I tell people in sales is, look, how many phone calls are you making, how many outreaches are you making, and how often do you get somebody in and you're fumbling through what you're going to say? When you find yourself in that same situation, 30 times a week, or 30 times a day, it shouldn't be something that you're winging. You should have a consistent process that says, here's the way I deal with that when it comes up. And then when the client brings up that scenario, you know exactly how to deal with it because you've practiced it with half a dozen of your colleagues. You practice it for an hour a week, and see two or three different people each week go through the same type of scenario. So, when it comes up, you don't freak out. You're not concerned. You say, Oh, I know how to deal with this. And I'm sure that as a dentist, your husband, you wouldn't want a dentist to perform a procedure for the first time on you having never practiced that, or never trained it. 

Meridith Elliott Powell 11:26

Never, no. And I even think, I think it goes deeper than that. I mean, you certainly you have a Kobe Bryant out there working on fundamentals. But there is, when he goes into a game, because he's done that, there's the confidence that you deliver. And that's how I feel like when I practice. I mean, you and I are both keynote speakers, and the keynote speaking is so much more than the hour we get up on stage to keynote. There's the, every time I see somebody, my husband sees somebody walking around talking to themselves, he says, outside, he says they must be a keynote speaker. Because I've been known to go for hikes or a mountain bike ride, just to get my, just to say my keynote, you know, because if I can do my keynote while doing something else, I know that the keynote is coming from here. But, you practice it and you practice it and you practice it, because then when you deliver it, you believe in it. You're sold. You're speaking with energy. Well see, it's the same thing in a sales call. I mean, I sit here, after being in sales for 30 years, I'm far more confident in a sales call than I was at 22., because I've practiced it. I've done it, I’ve, those types of things. But it is always the best people that continue to practice. 

Ian Altman 12:40

Absolutely. It's fascinating to me, because when people get in these scenarios where they're working with a team of people, and the organization makes it optional, so some people practice and some people don’t, what I'll find is that if we're in a session together, the person who is saying, Well, here's another way you may want to try that is the person who practices all the time, because they've worked through 50 different ways to solve that puzzle, as opposed to the person who is winging it. And then my favorite complaint that I hear is, well, just, just know that I'm much better when it's real. It's like, well, actually, you probably aren't. You probably aren't much better. That's the unfortunate reality. You think you are, which is a great testament to your confidence, no matter how misplaced it might be. And instead, what we want to do is, just have you be in a situation where you know what you're doing. There's a concept that someone referred to as staircase brilliance. And I wish I could attribute who had said it. I don't recall who it was, but they referred to a staircase brilliance, is when you have absolute brilliance of what you should have said as you're walking down the staircase. And you're like, oh, man, you know, I should have said this. Well, when you practice, you get those elements of staircase brilliance, where you say, oh, in this particular improv, in this roleplay, I should have said this. And the next time that presents itself, you might say it, but I can assure you that if you go through that scenario, five times in practice, by the fourth or fifth time, that's just going to be your natural response. And then when something comes up, you won't be fazed by it. So, when the client says, “Well, this all looks great, but you know, you're just too expensive compared to the alternatives.” You don't want to say, oh, uh, uh. You want to be in a position to say, “Well, the only way we could reduce the price is if we scale back on some of the results we're talking about, and my sense is, that wouldn't work for you. Did we miss something?” And so, you want to have that ability to know exactly how you deal with that situation when it comes up. Rather than, you're winging it, now your emotions kick in. You're not giving the best response. 

Meridith Elliott Powell 14:53

I would say agree with that. I gotta tell you one other excuse that I love. This one just popped into my head, but I love it when they say Well, somebody might ask me something I don't know. And I always think, why would you want to be asked something you don't know when you are smack in front of a customer and it matters? And, wouldn't you rather be asked something you don't know by one of your colleagues, when there's nothing to lose? And, you know, it's like, you know, if you've ever, if you've ever fallen on your face, whether it's a sales call, or a keynote, or you know, just, just anything, it is so much better to have fallen on your face, when it doesn't matter, because the odds are, you are going to fall on your face. Life just works that way. So, you want to do it at a time when other people can say no big deal. Let's talk about why that didn't work, or why you got stuck? Or, how you can handle a question that you don't know, so that you look in control, at least, of that, of that situation. So, it's just interesting. I mean, it's, it's something that could make you so much better, but people really salespeople really struggle to think that practice is a good use of their time. 

Ian Altman 16:09 

And it's bad. I do think that part of it is that ego aspect that says, well, I don't want people to know that maybe the emperor has no clothes. But, I think, I think, the other side of it is the notion of, we need to set certain rules or guidelines that guide people for success. For example, my rule of thumb is, you're not allowed to say, “okay, timeout, timeout, wait.” That doesn't work. You can't do that because you can't do that in a meeting. So, if someone asks you a question, and you don't know the answer to it, you need to know, how do you deal with a question, and you don't know the answer, you need to know how do you deal with a question where you don’t know the answer? And, it might be something as simple as, I don't have the complete answer that right now, and I don't want to give you partial information. Is it okay if I get the answer that question, and then get back to you later today or tomorrow? Right? So, that's, that's totally fine. But if you said, Well, I don't, I don't know, and now you pause, what you're doing is you're making it so it's not real. And I think it's critical that the examples, A. be real and B. that they change. When we introduced the Same Side Improv, what people said that was really fascinating is, and one, one of the outcomes was something that was intended, and one was something that we didn't intend at all. So, the first one is that people said, “I met with this client, and the meeting went almost exactly like we had rehearsed it.” It's like, well, of course, that's the whole idea of practicing different scenarios. The second thing that happened is, so, we have these secret cards that people select, and the secret card basically tells them, and it's all digital now, but the secret card is, here's an attribute that, that the customer has, that they're taking on, you can pick between one and three attributes for each round. So, it might be things like, you don't trust vendors, we've had bad results trying this in the past, you have a friend or relative that sells the same thing, you're seeking the cheapest price, you want to get free information, there's executive pressure to solve this, things like that. And what happens is people say, “Well, so, we practice every week, and I went and met with a real prospect, and the prospect said something, and I thought, I know what secret they have. Now, when I first heard that, I thought, Oh, dear God, you actually printed this stuff out, handed them the cards to take on the roles. We didn't do that. It's just the client was saying the same thing that we say are asking the same questions that we asked when we have that card. So, when they started doing that, it was like, aha, they're just trying to get free information. And they said, it sounds like you're content with your current vendor, you're just trying to get a different perspective or different input. Is that right? Yeah, that's, that's kind of where we're at. Okay. And now, you know, effective sales is not about persuasion or coercion. It's about getting the truth as quickly as possible. 

Meridith Elliott Powell 18:54

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's, there's, you know, there's so many good things that come out of a practice. You know, it's even, I find the top performing teams that we work with, even teams that are doing exceptionally well, every time you go in and you do a roleplay, you find some things you could tweak, and you could do even better. And with competitors on your heels, that's what it's about. It's not about reaching the crescendo and stalling out. It's about constantly looking at it and saying, you know, this really worked, in fact, we landed a multimillion-dollar deal. Let's go back and pick it apart, and let's see what we did that really nailed it. And if there's anything that we could do to even take it up a notch. So it isn't always about preventing mistakes. A lot of times it's about really taking it up a level and making what is a high performing team, even better. 

Ian Altman 19:48

I love that perspective, because it's about, whether it was a successful outcome or not, I would often say to my team, okay, regardless the outcome, what should we have done differently, right? And oftentimes people say, well, no, we won the account. Like, that's not the point. We won the account. What should we have done differently? Even if it was, it would have made things easier for the client, it would have been a smoother process, whatever it is, there's always something that we should, we should envision doing a little bit better. And I think that's, that's a critical aspect of this element of practice. 

So, let me do kind of a quick 30-second recap of what I think our takeaways are, and then I will give you opportunity for rebuttal to find the ones that I miss, and so, I'm doing these on the fly. So, when people don't practice, we know that the top performing athletes and, top performers in every industry practice, people in sales often have excuses why not. Some of the favorite excuses that we hear are things like, well, I don't have time, it's uncomfortable, I'm already good enough, I don't need to, or that notion of, well, I've already been practicing a little bit so I'm good enough, or that one that we didn't mention that comes up often is, well, I talked to clients all the time, so I don't need to practice because I'm doing it all the time. What we want to do is make sure that we dedicate an hour a week to real live roleplay scenarios. We can't pause in the middle, because you can't with a real client. You've got to go through from beginning to end during that timeframe. And then we want to solicit feedback, not only during practice, but after we have actual meetings with clients, recap the meeting as a team and say, what, what worked well, what didn't work, well, what should we change. So, I'm sure I left something out there, Meridith.

Meridith Elliott Powell 21:35

I think you really came close to completely nailing it. I would just say the only thing is to really shift your mindset around it, is that really think about the fact of it is, practice is the place where you want to make mistakes, where you want to have challenges, where you want to have obstacles, don't save those for the for, the real meetings, and make that a safe place to work and, and to improve. And at the end of the day, it's 100%, your choice. If you want to be a top performing team, if you want to own the market, if you want to take the confidence and the energy in front of the customer, which is really all they're buying from you, then you have to put, then you have to put in the practice.

Ian Altman 22:15

Phenomenal perspective. I think that notion of having that confidence, and recognizing that the way you approach the sales process, and your sales methodology, actually can be one of the greatest differentiators for your business compared to your competition. Meridith when people want to learn more about you and connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that? 

Meridith Elliott Powell 22:37

They can find me at ValueSpeaker.com. That's my website, just the words ValueSpeaker.com. I'm a big believer, in build your network, it will change your life. So, if you connect with me, I will connect with you. The social media channel, I tend to live on is LinkedIn. So, reach out and connect with me there. 

Ian Altman 22:53

You know, and likewise, I spend most of my time, in terms of the social media world, on LinkedIn. And of course, you can always visit me at SameSideSelling.com. Thanks, and we look forward to speaking again on the next episode.

Ian Altman 00:00 

Hey, it's Ian Altman. Welcome to another episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. I am joined by the ever-so-talented Meridith Elliott Powell. Meridith, welcome once again. 

Meridith Elliott Powell 00:11

Thank you. And, I gotta say, I am really excited about today's show because we're going to talk about sales conversations and how to make sales conversations productive. I mean, that may sound like a vanilla conversation to people, but it is so important. I always say that a sales call is a privilege because you have just done one of the hardest things in sales -- you have gotten through the door! You have gotten somebody to give you something that is so precious to them; that is their time. The last thing you want to do is blow it. The last thing you want to do is waste it for your client or for yourself.

So, we thought what we would talk about today is how to structure, how to create a really productive sales call. But, we're going to do it in kind of a unique way in sort of showing you what an unproductive sales call looks like. Now, Ian, I know you have some structure and some thoughts around really what a sales call ought to look like and how it ought to flow.

Ian Altman 01:07

Absolutely. And, so the structure, and it's something that's in chapter four of Same Side Selling, the book, which is called The Same Side Quadrants. If you get the printed book, it's on page 76. And, just for everyone's reference, it's the only page reference I know in the book. It’s just, people often say, “Well, where the quadrants?” and it took me a while to look it up and finally memorize that, you know, it's on page 76. But, the idea of the Same Side Quadrants is that in a meeting we, in essence, take notes, using a, if you think of it as you take a blank sheet of paper, draw a vertical line down the center, horizontal line across it, creating four equal quadrants on the page. In the upper left quadrant, we take notes about the client’s issue, namely, what it is that piqued their interest? In the upper right quadrant, we take notes about their impact and relative importance, meaning, what happens if they don't solve and what is the relative importance? In the lower-left quadrant, we take notes about their results. What does success look like going forward? And lower right quadrant, we take notes about who else needs to be involved, who else is impacted, so we get all the right people involved. So, that's a structure for what might look like a great meeting. Now, what I want to do is, I want to focus, and we're going to give examples on what may not work out so well, and then we can, then we can show you how to apply the Same Side Quadrants to make it so that maybe an awkward, unproductive meeting turns out a little bit better.

Meridith Elliott Powell 02:19

I love that. I love that. So, let me ask you this, um, when you're working through the quadrants, how do you start? Where do you begin? And, what are some of the mistakes you see salespeople make right off the bat?

Ian Altman 02:51

Well, so, one mistake that people make is early on in the process, they start talking about themselves or their products. So, it's almost like the phone call would start with, so they get through to somebody and they say, “Oh, I want to tell you about our products and services,” or like, you know, I get these emails all the time that say, “Oh, I want to talk to you about our, our software development services, and you should use us for this for your Same Side Selling Academy, and we can be cheaper than anybody else.” 

So, the two big mistakes are number one, they talk about themselves, and number two, they lead with, “we're cheaper.” And here's the irony, there isn't an organization on the planet whose goal is to find the cheapest. Most people do not change because something is 5% less than something else. They will change in a heartbeat if they have a serious problem that's impacting their business, and they believe that your solution can overcome that problem. And, they may not even care what it costs, as long as the cost is less than what it's costing them to not solve that problem. So, that first trap is that people lead by talking about themselves. And, if you want to give an example of what that might sound like, and keep in mind, Meridith is a talented professional, don't try this at home. Don't try and come up with these bad approaches. I don't want you, I don't want you trying to emulate what Meridith is going to demonstrate here, because it's just, we're purposely trying to illustrate examples of what not to do because it helps us better understand what we should be doing.

Meridith Elliott Powell 04:28

Well, here's, here's going to be my demonstration because I just got one. I just got one this morning. And, I call this the bait and switch, where somebody believes they understand not talking about themselves first, so they throw a little salt down there that makes it look like they're not talking about themselves, and then they immediately talk about themselves. I had somebody reach out to me this morning from a learning platform wanting to talk to me about putting my courses on their learning platform. And, quote, unquote, this was their opening: “Hello, Meridith. You put, you post very interesting things on LinkedIn. I really enjoyed the podcasts you did on Thrive and was quite interested in the guests that you had. I can see that you do a lot in the learning field. I would love 15 minutes of your time to talk about our learning platform and just to show you how it would work. I think that it would be of great value for you.” 

Now, why that is wrong is, there is no bone in my body that believes they have any interest in me at all. What they did was they went to my LinkedIn post, which I'll give them a cookie for that at least. At least they saw the last thing I did, which was my Thrive podcast. They saw it. They looked at it, got the name of the guest, and I know they didn't know more than the name of the guest, because they didn't tell me anything about her or anything that was in the show, and they just used it as the segue to do what Ian is telling you not to do: talk about yourself.

Ian Altman 06:07

Yeah. And it's fascinating because if they had merely said, “Hey, I caught you on your Thrive episode. I loved the guest, the, you know, this guest that you had on. I especially liked how you talked about this topic. I don't know whether or not our platform would be of use to you. Just because it's helpful for other people, it may not be the right fit for you. Can we spend 15 minutes to determine whether or not it's worth taking a closer look?” 

You might have been receptive to that, because then they're using a concept that I talk about called disarming, which is I'm disarming the notion that I'm just there to sell you and that I think that my solution is the answer to everything. I'm acknowledging that it's not the right fit for everyone. So, I'm saying, “Look, I help other talented speakers and authors like you, Meridith. But, just because we do that doesn't mean it's the right fit for you. Sure, it's generated millions of dollars for them, but you know, you may not want that tax burden, or whatever it happens to be.” The idea is that we want to disarm that notion, and then you might have been receptive, and then they would have screwed it up, but at least then you might have been receptive initially,

Meridith Elliott Powell 07:15

Completely. That's it, that, that is a completely non-threatening conversation. It also tells me that you went a little bit deeper. I mean, look, salespeople have to make a lot of calls. I have to make a lot of calls. I don't expect you to do a ton of homework up on me. But, when somebody bothers to look at my you know, my profile, see what I've done, take a little bit of an interest in it, it's attractive. And then, don't push, suggest. I mean, in essence, that's how I would describe what you were doing. The first person was really pushing this on me, it just felt like a bait and switch, versus the other is, I'd like to get to know you. I'd like to just see where the where this is going, and it opens, you know, it opens the door so much more.

Ian Altman 07:59

Yeah. So, what are some of the other mistakes that you see people making these conversations with clients?

Meridith Elliott Powell 08:04

Okay, so this one is huge for me: when salespeople ask questions, they should already know the answer to. 

You know, when there is so much information available on Google, so much information for us to be able to research in our, in our customers annual report. Remember, this isn't just a reach out, you got the sales conversation. I have had said, “Yes, I am willing to give you my time.” If you're going to spend the first 15 minutes asking me questions that you already should know the answer to, then you told me right from the beginning, that you haven't done your homework, you're not prepared, and you're not going to efficiently use the 30 minutes that I've given you. So, Ian, you have any examples of what that might look like?

Ian Altman 09:00

Oh, you know, a ton of them. So, oftentimes it comes down, I was, I was waiting with bated breath on what you were going to share. But, the example of that often comes down to this notion of, “So uh, so, are you guys a software company?” It's like, you don't know that already? Or, “How many employees do you have?” You couldn't get that from a quick Google search? Or, “Which office are you in?” Well, you couldn't find that from my LinkedIn profile? Those sorts of things. Or when it's, when it's even worse than that, or it's like someone can look up the size of your business, and I get these emails from people saying, “Oh, here's this whole hiring process.” It's like, yeah, I used to have a company with offices in 12 countries, but that was 15 years ago. I don't have that anymore, so, I don't need all process for hiring and onboarding people, because, you know, I've got a very small team. It's not a, it's not a major problem for me. I think that too often people don't do that level of homework up front. 

The other thing that that that just drives me nuts is, one of the biggest complaints that people in sales have is my clients are always focused on price. Then, I listen in on their phone calls, and their phone calls will often start with, and whether it's a phone call a meeting in person, whatever, they'll say, “Oh, we're using someone for the service right now.” Right? Yeah. Okay. “Well, maybe we can save you a little bit.” And, what I've just done, and it's usually unintentional, is I've now just told the client that all that really matters is price. And then, I'm surprised that two conversations later they say, “Well, you're too expensive. I want to be less expensive.” Like, but we have all this value. No, you started the conversation about price. So, I just, at this point, you've just attracted people who are focused on price. Now you're complaining that they're focused on price.

Meridith Elliott Powell10:54 

And, you've lowered the conversation to price. I think the only reason a customer ever chooses price is because they believe that price is all there is. 

Like, if I believe that this apple is the exact same as the other apple, then, of course, I'm going to compare them on price, and, of course, I'm going to take the cheaper one. I mean, I would be stupid not to do that. But, if I believe that one apple has more vitamins in it, if one apple will keep me full longer through the, you know, longer through the day, if one apple could make me feel younger, I have more energy, all of a sudden, that apple has more value, and the fact that it's a quarter or 50 cents more is starting to become irrelevant. 

This is one of the biggest jobs we have as salespeople This is the part that cannot be automated, right? I mean, we get in there and we intimately understand the problem, and then we can take the product, or service, and we can customize it in a value-added way to solve that problem. You do that, that takes price off the table.

Ian Altman 12:05

And then, when that client pushes back on price and says, “Well, this is too expensive,” if you've done your homework, if you've if you've discussed with them these quadrants, so you've discussed what's their issue, and what it is that they're trying to solve, and what's the impact of not solving that, and, and its relative importance, and then the big gap that people fail to talk about in most cases is, what does success look like, and what can jeopardize that success? We'll get to that in a minute. If I've done all that, and the client says, “Well, gee, I don't know, Meredith. Your solution is too expensive.” What I might come back with is, “Look, you mentioned that you have this problem. It's costing you $20 million a year in lost business, and you mentioned that this is what we're going to measure for success going forward, and the only way that I can achieve those results is at this price point. Now, if you think that we can scale back the results, if you think solving this completely isn't worth it, then maybe we can come up with a different solution that would cost less, what do you think?” And then the client now, what you're doing is you're comparing their problem and results to price, and you're saying the only way to get a lower price is to get lower results. Is that what you're looking for? And now we're having a discussion about value, not about just price?

Meridith Elliott Powell 13:22

Absolutely. You are selling the solution. You have got to remember; you are selling the solution. It is such a myth that customers, I don't care the industry you're in, they're not price sensitive. If you're losing on price, it’s because price is all you sold.

Ian Altman 13:36

Yeah. And, I think that in most salespeople's minds, the finish line is the sale, is the contract, is, you know, that's more high fiving and celebrating. And, the reality is that, for the client, the finish line is the results. So, if we're focused on the sale, and they're focused on the results, we have a mismatch, we're not aligned. 

But, if instead, I say to them, “Okay, that's great. Well, what are we going to measure six months down the road that to know that we're successful? What do you think would really be able to quantify?” And the client will usually step back and like, “Hmm, let me think about that. I don't know.” Because no one's asked that question before. They say, “Well, I think if we could, if we could cut our time to market, if we could gain more market share.” “How much market share realistically, if we did this, do you think you could capture?” “Oh, it could be 10 or 20%.” “10 or 20%? And, how big is your business? I mean, how much would that be?” Let them tell you what the numbers are. And they go, “It could be, you know, $20 million a quarter.” Okay. “Even if we did everything we said we would do, what might prevent you from getting those results?” And, now the client says, “Well maybe if our people weren't trained enough on how to use whatever it is that you're doing.” Great. “So, should we include training in our proposal?” “Oh, yeah, that's a good idea.” And now, they're building what they need based on the results they're looking for.

 And when I do this with, with organizations, and there's an exercise I do with CEOs where I say, okay, so you've gone through this process, and one vendor is focused on the sale, and another vendor is focused on how they're going to measure results with you. Which vendor would you rather deal with? 100% of the time they want to deal with the person focused on results. Then I say, well, so how many of you would be willing to pay more for that vendor? And all of them raise their hands and say they'd be willing to pay more for that vendor. I say how much? The most common answer is 10 to 20%. And, I don't mean, the most common answer is a number between there. I mean, the most common answer is they say, “I don't know, 10 to 20%.”. That's the most common answer. And, what I want people to understand is that, I'm not saying that that vendor is guaranteeing those results. The mere fact that they are asking about the results makes the client, these executives, inclined to pay 10 to 20% more for the solution. That's a big trap that people need to make sure that they that they avoid, which is if you're not talking about results, you're missing the boat.

Meridith Elliott Powell16:14

Completely, you're just wasting the sales conversation. You know, Ian, another one that really drives me crazy is when you finish the sales conversation and you say to the customer, you know, “I'll get back to you, you know, I just need to work on some things. How about I get back to you on Tuesday at four o'clock?” And the customer says, “Tuesday's not good for me, just let me get back to you.” And the sales professional accepts that, and leaves the sales conversation. 

The reason this makes me crazy is, again, you have done the hard work. You got in the door, in my opinion, that is the hardest thing to do in sales. Once you can get in there, you have structured this conversation beautifully. You have done your homework. You have asked the right questions. You have gotten them to a point where they, you know, they want to buy, or at least they're piqued to have another conversation with you, and you let it slip out of your hands. You gave away control of that conversation.

Ian Altman 17:23

And, Meridith, how should people handle that when the client says the client says to them, “Well, you know, what, Tuesday at four is not good for me. I'll just get back to you”? 

Meridith Elliott Powell 17:31

Yeah, I always say, “Ian you know what, you have a lot on your plate. I know you have a lot going on. Please don't worry about that. I'll follow up. I'll make sure, I'll make sure that and I'll take responsibility to make sure that we have, we have another call. So don't you worry about it, I'm going to handle it.” 

I just take control, and they need to take control of it. Do not give that piece away. Because in my opinion, it's like dating, if I waited for somebody to call me, I never would have gotten married. I had to take control of that situation.

Ian Altman 18:03

Well, there's, there's a life lesson too. That'll be the Same Side Dating podcast that will be premiering in June 2027. Make sure we address it then. 

So, and what I want people to think about is you can even say, “Well, if Tuesday at four isn't good. I want to make sure that I follow-up if this is still important to you. What's a convenient time? Let's put that on the calendar.” And, recognize that you might be in a situation where the client isn't that interested, and through this discussion, they determined they don't want to take the next step. And trust me, you're better off finding that out right now than then trying to chase them for two months and annoying them. 

So, if they say, “Well, I'll get back to you,” what you could say is, “You know, Meredith, I understand that. It sounds like, I know you said Tuesday at four wasn't good and then you want to get back to us. Sometimes when people say that, it's because they're just not that interested, but they don't have the heart to tell us. In other cases, it's just not that big of a priority. In other cases, it's hey, this is really a big important thing and we like your solution. I just can't think of the scheduling time. Which situation are we in right now?” So, I'm giving them two ways to get out, and one way to confirm an appointment. And it's totally okay because if they say, “You know Meridith, I'm really just not interested in this solution.” Then you can say “What was it about our about our stuff that didn't appeal to you?” And then you get more information from them. I don't know how you feel about that approach.

Meridith Elliott Powell 19:34

I do. I love that. I mean, I love the fact that you said you're better finding out now because, you know, this doesn't have anything to do with the sales conversation, but I think an important lesson for salespeople to learn is you only have time to chase so much business. And, I think one of the biggest mistakes we make as salespeople is because we get so high on the win. You know, I want to win. I want to convince you to do business for me. You're giving me a little bit of pushback. I want to, I want to get you to agree to do business with me. And it's the biggest mistake I ever made. 

The moment I say yes to one client, I'm saying no to 10 others. And, I just love what you're saying is, find out now. If this isn't good, don't continue to pursue it. Because there's so many other sales conversations out there you can be having with people who are ready to pull the trigger, people are ready to pay your price and people are ready to refer you business.

Ian Altman 20:27

Exactly. Well, let me let me give an attempt here to give a 30-second recap of the key points that I think people can use and apply to their business right now, and then I'll give you opportunity for rebuttal. Because undoubtedly, there's always something I leave out. 

So, the first thing is we want to make sure that we're not focused on ourselves and talking about us, but instead of talking about the client situation. And, don't use that bait and switch where you make it sound like you want to talk about the client, but you really want to talk about yourself. 

The second thing is, that don't get into the trap, where you're the one bringing up price and price being the most important thing by saying, “Oh, maybe I can save you money.” or “How much you spending now? Maybe I can save you, maybe I can save you dollars?”  That's not going to help either. 

We want to make sure, instead, we follow a structured process around the Same Side Quadrants of issue in the upper left, impact importance in the upper right, in the lower left, results, and in the lower right, others impacted or others involved. And that way, we have a structure around our meeting, so we're focused on the things that matter to them. 

And, we always want to make sure we're having that meaningful discussion about the results that people are seeking out, because their finish line is results. It's not the sale. 

And Meridith, I'm gonna leave it to you to focus on that next step piece and anything else I left out?

Meridith Elliott Powell 21:43

Well, I think you did a great job of wrapping it up. I think the one thing that I want to add is you really need to go to what page is it? 76? 74? 

Ian Altman

Page 76. You got it. 

Meridith Elliott Powell

I thought I did, and look at those four quadrants. I mean, you know, what we've been talking about today loosely is, in essence, the structure. And, I think that the underlying foundational piece is you need a structure to your sales conversation. Don't waste it. It's critical. You know, it isn't necessarily about the quantity of sales conversations you have, it’s about the quality of sales conversations you have. Respect it for your client, respect it for yourself. Use a structure and watch as, not only more deals close, but more clients are satisfied and more referrals and more opportunities happen.

Ian Altman 22:30

Fantastic. So, if you want to connect with either me or Meridith, you can connect to Ian Altman or Meridith Elliott Powell on LinkedIn. We're easy to find there. Just mention the podcast and that's pretty much surefire way that will accept that connection. We might get one or two additional connection requests each day and it's always nice to know where they came from. 

And then, of course, you can learn more about what each of us does visit. ValueSpeaker.com for information on Meridith and SameSideSelling.com for information on me. 

This has been Ian Altman and Meridith Elliott Powell, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. Bye now.

Welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast. It's Ian Altman, and I'm joined by Meridith Elliott Powell. What we're talking about today is, we're recording this in mid-2021, and now people are coming out of the pandemic, things are opening up. Events are starting to happen in person, clients are actually having meetings in person. 

And, what I want to discuss today, and what Meridith and I are going to dive into is, what are the things and the traps that people are falling into today, that might be similar to traps they fell into as the pandemic was starting, and what can we learn going forward? 

So, Meridith, first, what are some of the traps, either back when the pandemic started, or now, that you're seeing people fall into that we can learn from? 

Meridith Elliott Powell  00:52

You know, it is kind of crazy. I mean, here we are light at the end of the tunnel, right? We're starting to come out of the pandemic. The world starting to open again. But as sales professionals, we're falling into some of the same traps. 

One of the biggest I think, and in all honesty, if you didn't take anything else from this podcast today, I think this would be incredibly valuable. It's the fact that the problem that you solved before COVID, the problem that you solved during COVID, and the problem that you sell and are solving, as we come out of COVID, they are all different. You have to understand that. 

I was talking to a client just the other day, and I said, “How are things going,” and she said, “Oh my God,” she said, “Coming out of COVID is so much harder than going into COVID.” They're in the restaurant industry and the problems and the regulations and just the emotions of customers. 

And, it really triggers the fact that, as a sales professional, what I'm solving, what I'm dealing with, and what I'm helping my customer with is different now. I may be selling the same products, but their problems have changed. And, I think as sales professionals getting into the trap that you're still solving the same thing is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. 

Ian Altman  02:01

Well, I think that what illustrates that is,  you think about it, if you're a restaurant group today, your biggest challenge is how do I hire people?

I was at a restaurant yesterday, and I was talking to one of the managers. It's a restaurant we've been going to for many years. And the manager said, “Right now, I have 15 total servers in my restaurant.” He said, “The reason why the restaurant isn't that full right now is not because we don't have demand, we do.” But, he said “We need to staff 40 people, and we can only handle 15.” 

So if you were someone who was pitching uniforms to a restaurant, the restaurant group is looking at you like, dude, uniforms? I need to find people, I don't need uniforms. Like I need people I can put uniforms on. And so I think that becomes a challenge. I think that going into the pandemic, the issue was that people were in sometimes in a crisis mode and sometimes in a thriving mode. So, I have clients who are selling to people in health care, and they were actually in some cases thriving, or, or it could have been somebody who is in a medical profession where they couldn't see patients, and now they were struggling.

But guess what, whatever you were saying to them before had changed, and now it's different. I think that, now as things are opening up, what I'm seeing in many areas is, how do we better engage our employees? How do we bring people back into the fold? And if you don't have a message that ties into that at all, then you might struggle a little bit earning attention.

So, I think the biggest thing that you're focused on, is having that awareness about what is different in your client's world that you can address uniquely, that maybe other people are overlooking. 

Meridith Elliott Powell  03:44

Yeah, I mean, Ian, in essence, what you're talking about is, the mistake we make as salespeople is not focusing on being relevant. And, we've really got to focus on being relevant and for our clients. Their world is changing. I'm going to tell you another big trap, I think, that we're falling into. And, that is the fact that when COVID hit, sales professionals thought, I don't want to bother my clients. I mean, they've got a lot on their plate, they're overwhelmed. The last thing they want to do is buy something right now. 

And, now that the world is opening back up, we're seeing the same thing. We're assuming that people are busy, we're assuming that, you know, they're still challenged by things that don't have anything to do with our line of business, and that our customers don't want to hear from us.

It was a mistake at the beginning of COVID. It's a mistake in the middle of COVID. And it sure as heck is a mistake that, when you know, when we're coming out of COVID. We are essential. And, I, you know, we really need to be more aggressive, I believe, than we've ever been. 

Ian Altman  04:42

And, I think part of that is helping your clients understand, here's how we're helping other organizations like yours. And, it's giving them a sense of, oh, I hadn't really thought about that. 

So, for example, I've been having conversations, as I'm sure you have with clients recently where I say, look, a lot of people right now saying, how do we reintroduce ourselves? How do we determine which meetings we should have in person and which ones are remote? How do we figure out what's most important to our clients?

So, I'll say to them, Look, these are some of the biggest challenges that people are addressing. What's your strategy for addressing those, and how might I be able to help? And oftentimes, when you present it that way, the first thing goes to their mind is, I haven't even thought about it. So, the way you can help is by helping me think about it. 

Is that a strategy that you'd recommend for people in general? 

Meridith Elliott Powell  05:29

I think that's so key and so important is, the fact that you know, as sales professionals, don't be put off by the fact that, maybe, people aren't returning an email or are returning a phone call. They have a whole lot on their plate. They're absolutely busy. But it doesn't mean they don't need you, and it doesn't mean that when the time is right, they're going to go to the person who's most visible, who's most out there. So, don't look at a lack of responsiveness as rejection. 

Everybody's busy, but, but, they need to hear from you. As they open up, they're going to need you to solve to, solve those problems. 

Ian Altman  06:08

Yep. And, I think that the underlying message that I want to make sure everyone gets is we're focused on what's important for our client. Not what were we selling last month? What do we want to sell? But instead, it's your point, it's that idea of relevancy. 

Are we talking to our clients about the things that, when they hear it, they say, “Oh, that's a topic I want to learn more about. That's a conversation I want to have.” As opposed to, very often we see people in sales, and I'm sure you're on the receiving end of these as, as much as I am, where someone says,” Hey, I'd love to set up 15 minutes to introduce myself and my company.” And I'm thinking, okay, that may be an interesting offer, but I'm not interested in it. And, maybe it’s interesting to someone else, but just not me, because I don't have a desire to carve out time in my day to hear somebody pitch their company.

But, if someone said, when I work with people like you, when I work with people who are financial services professionals when I work with technology executives when I work with, you know, you name it, when I, when I'm working with professional services companies, here are some of the three biggest challenges that I'm hearing, how common are those? Now, all of a sudden, what we're saying is, okay, I'm in touch with the types of things that are moving the needle in your industry.  Should we have a conversation about those?  That's where we can actually pique someone's interest. 

Meridith Elliott Powell  07:31

Yeah, which, you know, you really, it's a segue into another great challenge or, or mistake we as sales professionals are making. We made it when COVID started, and we're making it now is, is the fact that it's not about you. 

You know, it is not about you hitting your sales quota, it's not about you selling your product. You need to be 100% focused on the customer. If you do that, the rest is going to come. 

But you know, a lot of us are starting to feel pressure because the doors are opening is, as the, you know, industries are turning back on. We're like, yay, we can make our revenue from last year. I can get back on track. And, all of that is true. But it's still through the path of focusing 100% first on the customer and what they need. Just remember, this is not about you. You come second. 

Ian Altman  08:20

The funny part about this is that, when I talk to reps, what they'll say is “No, I get it, it's not about us, it's about the client.” And so what they'll do is, they'll say, “Well, so here are the three biggest challenges that people in your same position have been coming to us to address. Does one of those stand out for you?” 

And the client says, “Yeah, you know what that second one really stands out for me.  And, what the rep immediately says is, “Oh, let me tell you about what I sell that does that.” And it's like, no, no, no, you were so close. You're so close. 

Meridith Elliott Powell  08:51

You're almost there. 

Ian Altman  08:52

You're almost there. And, all you have to do is say, “Hmm, tell me a little bit more about that.” Or, “Tell me, why did you pick that one?”

And, now we're talking about what's important to them. There's plenty of time for you to talk about your stuff in terms of the solution to deliver the outcome that they need. But, the mistake that, unfortunately, too often gets made is, as soon as the client gives even the slightest inclination that says I might be interested in what you have, they go into pitch mode. And they're like, now let me that let me give you a demo. Let me show you this stuff. Let me give you all this extraneous information in PDF that you can read, instead of asking more about their situation, and what's piqued their interest.   

Because once we do that, that's when we can really have a conversation about the value that we're bringing, compared to what they're experiencing today. 

Meridith Elliott Powell  09:49

Completely. I mean, it's, you know, that whole idea of you have to build relationship and trust first to truly understand. 

You know, during COVID, after COVID, your customers can buy the product without you. There is very little we can't buy in this world while sitting at our computers and Googling. The value you bring is the relationship, the trust, and the resource, and information you can provide once you have built relationship and trust. 

So, never believe it is about you and your sales quota. All that's going to come, in fact, you'll blow by it if you start first by understanding that it's not about you. 

Ian Altman  10:27

And, Meridith, one of the things that I get is that sometimes reps will say, “Well, then they asked me.” They'll say, “Yeah, we have that second problem. How does your product solve that?” And, the rep says, “Well I had to tell them about it.”

No you don't. Because, if you ask me that question, I can say, “You know what, Meridith, before I get into the product, I want to make sure that I fully understand what it is you're facing, and whether or not it can even help. So, can I ask you a few more questions to make sure that I'm not giving you information about our product, if it won't help?” 

Who’s going to say no to that? Who's gonna say no to that. Who's gonna say, “No, no, I want a demo of a product that can’t help me.” No one's gonna say that! 

Meridith Elliott Powell  11:04

Because nobody really wants to sit through a demo anyhow. So, you're absolutely right. 

But, you know, what Ian, what you're saying is so key. And, it reminds me so much of us doing a keynote. I mean, the thing that you learn about doing a keynote, is you don't give the goods away at the beginning because nobody will stay to the end. 

It's the same thing in a sales conversation. You know, the moment, if you release your solution too fast, and you haven't really done your due diligence, you don't really intimately understand how it can specifically solve their problem, you've given them the opportunity to say no, to quit listening, before you ever really got into the conversation. 

So, hold that till the end. That's what's keeping them engaged. They want to know the solution. You give it away at the front, you've lost them. 

Ian Altman  11:54

And, the reality is this, is that, oftentimes, until you've asked the right questions until you've had enough discussions, you don't know what they ultimately need anyhow. 

So, your product that you're thinking of, so let's say it's a technology company. They might have a piece of software that's $50,000. The service engagements might range between 50,000 and a million dollars. And, the client says, “Well, will your product do this?” And, you don't yet have enough information. And, so, you go in and say, “Well, yeah, let me show you a demo of it.” 

And now the client is thinking, Okay, that's great. And then, through the course of your discussions going on, all of a sudden, you realize, well, the product is just like a rounding error, in comparison, what they really need. 
And, here's the other big trap that I find is that, as soon as you start talking about your product, any of your questions seem to have an ulterior motive around getting the client to buy your product. 

Instead of, if you continually push back and say, “I don't yet know that it can help you, I want to learn a few more things. Because there are three key elements we have to see to know that our products are the right fit, that we're the right fit between you and us. So, we want to figure that out before we just pitch stuff. Is that okay?” 

And it's refreshing for the client because they're thinking to themselves, wait, you mean, you don't want to just come in and give us a demo and have a meeting and all these cliche terms that we hear? You mean, you actually want to hear whether or not there's a fit first? Well, there's a novel concept. They may not even know what to do with that. 

Meridith Elliott Powell  13:26

That's right. There's a differentiator in the marketplace. Absolutely. 

Ian Altman  13:30

Yeah. And so, I think that's an element that really gets down to focusing on as we come out of this pandemic. Making sure that we're focusing on those pieces that are relevant to the client, and then remembering that it's all about the client and their needs, not about what it is that you're selling. 

Meridith Elliott Powell  13:47

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we've got to focus our time and attention there. 

You know, it's interesting, our circumstances may change, the situations may change, there may be markets full of opportunity and those full of challenge. But, the basics of how to sell, the foundational piece, really, really remain, you know, remain the same. 

Ian Altman  14:06

Excellent. Well, let me try and do my best to give a quick 30-second recap of all the topics we talked about, and then I'll give you opportunity for rebuttal to tell me which things I missed. And we'll, we'll take it from there, so that way people have actionable steps they can take coming out of this, this episode. So first, we need to make sure that we remain relevant with our clients.

So, what we were selling six months ago, six years ago, or six days ago may not be what the client needs today. The second thing we need to focus on is that it's not about us. It's all about the client and their needs. And to that end, what we want to do is make sure that we're focusing on: here are the biggest issues that we're seeing today. Which one of those jumps out? When that client then says, “Oh, that one piqued my interest,” avoid the temptation to go into your pitch, because what we want to do is, we want to hold back that key information.

We want to hold back what the solution might be until, A: until we've learned enough about their situation to know what's the right fit, and B: because if we prematurely give that information, then any conversation, any questions we ask will seem to have an ulterior motive, and we won't get to the truth. So, what did I miss Meridith? 

Meridith Elliott Powell  15:18

I don't know. I think you did a great job. I think you really did a great job of summing it up. 

I guess the only thing that I would add is, what's interesting about everything that Ian and I have talked about today is, the longer that you talk to customers, the better questions you ask, the more you're going to learn. 
The more you learn, the more relevant you're going to be. The more relevant you are, the differentiator you're going to have in the marketplace, the better you're going to be able to provide a customized solution, and the more deals you are going to close. 

I think if you go into a sales call, the less you can speak, the better. The more questions you can ask, the more successful you're going to be. 

Ian Altman  15:55

Excellent. So, I encourage our audience to reach out to Meridith Elliott Powell or Ian Altman on LinkedIn. We're happy to connect with you there. In fact, if you just mention, “Hey, heard you on the podcast,” that pretty much locks you into us accepting your invitation and connecting with you. 

And of course, you can visit ValueSpeaker.com for Meridith and SameSideSelling.com for me, Ian Altman. 
We'll see you on the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast 

Meridith Elliott Powell  16:22

See you next time!

00:04 Ian

Welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast. This is Ian Altman, and I'm joined by the talented, amazing Meridith Elliott Powell. Meridith, welcome once again.

00:16 Meridith

Thank you, looking forward to being here.

00:18 Ian

Can you give people just a little bit of your background for the three people on the planet who don't know who you are? 

00:25 Meridith

I am a business growth strategist, specializing in sales and leadership, and helping my clients learn everything they need to know to turn uncertainty into their competitive advantage. 

00:36 Ian

And I’m Ian Altman. Most people know me through the book, Same Side Selling, where we turn those adversarial tensions into buyer and seller working on the same side together to kind of solve a puzzle instead of being involved in a battle.

Today, we are talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is integrating sales and marketing so that they're not seen as two different universes, but instead, kind of one and the same, joined at the hip. So Meridith, when it comes to integrating and aligning sales and marketing, what are the biggest mistakes that you see people make? What are the traps or pitfalls they fall into that maybe people could learn from?

01:18 Meridith

Well, I think the first one is probably the one that is as plain as the nose on everybody's face. We talk about integrating sales and marketing, but we never actually do it. In most organizations that I go into marketing sits on one side of the building and sales sits on the other. Rarely did they share the same goal. Rarely do they share the same meeting. Rarely are the two held accountable for the same outcomes.

01:46 Ian

Yeah, and that's something that that, to me, is often fascinating. Often marketing will blame sales and sales will blame marketing when the reality is, they have the same goal. I look at it as marketing's job is to attract interest in established expertise, and sale's job is to, once those people have expressed interest in that expertise, to then navigate that buyer through the process to help them make a decision, and to determine who's a good fit and who isn't a good fit. Oftentimes, they’re so tightly intertwined that people don't even realize it. Yet, there are marketing meetings that happen every day without any input from people in sales, and there are sales meetings that happen every day and you'll never find a marketing person in attendance. And that's a big challenge. So how common is that? 

02:40 Meridith

Well, I think I see it quite a bit. I loved when you said, you know, one blames the other. And here's really where the challenge lies. In the middle of it is marketing never gets intimately involved enough with sales to understand it at a granular level. And sales never lets go of certain tasks to allow marketing to do it. 10 years ago, that was probably okay. It didn't affect the bottom line that much. But we now live in a global economy, and we're inundated with white noise. Sales has got to do what they are good at, what only they can do. That is the relationship build, as you said, navigate through and really get the get the buyer to buy for the first time. You need to give away the tasks of creating that awareness, building that brand visibility, and allow marketing to do that. But you need to provide them the feedback so that the messaging is right, and so your lead quality is right. You need to understand that if you're doing this all alone, even if you're successful, you're not nearly as successful as you could be.

03:56 Ian

Well, and it's interesting, because one of the ironies is this is that the biggest challenge when you talk to most marketing organizations is trying to figure out the right messaging that is going to resonate with our ideal customers. Marketing will do surveys and analysis and all this stuff on their own to try and figure that out. Well, who is talking to customers more than anybody else? The people in the sales organization. 

So, if you simply just said, once a week in a meeting, what are the biggest questions you're hearing from your clients? What are the biggest frustrations that they're facing? What are the things that they ask you about that you don't have an answer to today? You'd have a list a mile long of different topics that would resonate to attract clients. You would know what they need to know. 

The second topic that you can go after, now that you have a sense of what the salespeople are hearing that that customers want to know. is where do you spend time in sales creating information to send to customers. Meaning if you're writing the same email over and over again, trying to explain a concept, what if we created a piece of marketing content? What if we created a video that encapsulated that for you? You wouldn't have to do it. In fact, my friend Marcus Sheridan says, “A salesperson should never be reaching out to a potential client, without including some piece of marketing content that contributes to the conversation.” So don't just give them some. Here's a PDF that I would love for you to read. When we spoke last week, you mentioned this concern. I think this this piece of content might be helpful in the discussion. 

05:44 Meridith

Yeah, absolutely. 

05:47 Ian

How does your team measure up against others, when it comes to being on the same side with your clients or prospects? Find out at SameSideSelling.com/Scorecard to take the Same Side Selling Assessment. And, if you want to learn more about the Same Side Selling Academy, visit, SameSideSelling.com.

06:08 Meridith

You know, the other mistake I think that that we make in integrating sales and marketing is one of the most important parts of the sales call, and Ian, you and I have discussed it, is sales follow up. I mean, the chances that you're going to interact with somebody at the exact moment they're ready to buy, even if the lead is hot, even if the lead is well qualified, they're slim to none. It takes a lot of follow-up in today's marketplace in order to close the sale. Well, follow-up isn't something that salespeople should be doing by themselves, just like when you reach out to make a sales call, you want to include some form of marketing, marketing helping you with that follow-up is incredibly important. They can increase the amount of visibility, they can increase the value you bring with that visibility, and make it feel like it's less salesy and more relationship focused, but you need to be integrating what that looks like -- when the salesperson’s touch is going to be and when marketing needs to be taking over. But that's a powerful opportunity that most sales teams and marketing teams are not capitalizing on. 

07:16 Ian

Sure. I think one of the things that catches my attention often is that the marketing organization, often they confuse marketing in support of sales and marketing from a branding perspective. What I mean is that there's brand related marketing that says, how do we get our name out there, our reputation, so people know us at a broad level. Then, there's marketing, meaning research, data, and information that supports an actual sale for a client. When I see this breakdown, what will happen is their marketing team will say, “Here's a slide deck for you.” However, the first 10 slides are marketing for the purpose of the brand. So, that is marketing as it as it pertains to the to the brand, which is along the lines of here's how many offices we have, here's who we are. And, the reality is, nobody cares except for the marketing department. The client doesn't care. So, we can't use that type of information. Then they say, “Well, we provided this this slide deck and sales didn't use it.” Well, thank God, they didn't use it because it's a mess. Instead, what we need is to draw that distinction so that we say, okay, if this is marketing using for a sales opportunity, we want to open this presentation with, what is the client trying to solve? How can we solve that for other people? And specifically, how is this solution going to affect the client, not a whole bunch of generic jargon that people just don't care about?

08:49 Meridith

Yeah, I think what you're saying is so true. And I love the fact that you said we created a slide deck and sales didn't use it. You need to understand in sales, if you're not using the leads that marketing is giving you don't just say, “We're not going to use those leads.” Go back to marketing, talk to them, and talk about how to make those leads even better. 

The other thing I think is that sales does not, in general, provide enough feedback to marketing. Marketing puts on an event where you all invite your best clients. Then marketing never knows whether any of that turned into business. What was the follow-up process from it? Was it worth the investment that they did? I mean, in essence, I think a lot of what we're talking about is one of the biggest mistakes that sales and marketing make, and the way to correct, it is they don't talk to each other. They need to realize that it's not a perfect science. It's not a perfect art. You need to be massaging it and getting it right for your team.

09:51 Ian

And I think one of the keys to that is defining what success looks like before the event. So, for example, what often say with my clients is, “We're running this marketing event. Can you give us some input?” And I say, “What would success look like at the end of the event, immediately after the event? What does success look like? What are you going to measure 30 days, 60 days, 90 days after the event?” And, if you don't know, then you shouldn't be running that event. 

You need to think through, what are the metrics? My favorite term, in today's vernacular, is a marketing-qualified lead. Which, if you think about it, is so ironic, because it says, well, according to marketing this is qualified. Then when sales gets it, what do they say? This isn't qualified. And marketing says No, but it's a marketing-qualified lead. It doesn't matter. It should be either a qualified lead or non-qualified lead. Meaning, if marketing and sales agree that, when it meets these criteria, we both agree that that's a good lead, then that's a good lead. Now, whether or not it becomes an opportunity for us, that is sale's job to take it from somebody who met certain criteria, and now at the next step, we determine, is there a need for this? Do we have the right people involved? Is there a sense of urgency?  But, that notion of well, marketing said it's a lead, so now we're at odds with sales doesn't make sense. Instead, you’ve got to get on the same page, working together to define what success looks like for an event, and then what the criteria happens to be to define a good opportunity.

11:29 Meridith

Yeah, and I think you bring up such a great point, because I think we need to get there and really intimately define the roles. Because, even if marketing is sending you leads that are really qualified, often sales teams think these are like magic bullets, since it went through some qualifying process. If I call them, they should answer it. If I email, they should answer. You said, they just meet a certain level of criteria. In other words, marketing got you past first base, but you have to go to second, third, and bring it home. They got you. They did some of the heavy lifting. But the reason you're in sales is because you're good at what you do. You can sell, you can connect, you can critically think how to get past the gatekeeper. You still need to do all that. And then, if the lead doesn't work, you need to go back and tell marketing why. You put all your special sauce on top of it and it still didn't work, so, something still needs to be massaged in the process.

12:31 Ian

Yeah. I think, if you create that feedback loop, then you start getting better opportunities. If all you do is complain to your peers about why these leads, you're getting from marketing aren't any good, guess what? I promise you there isn't a single person in marketing, who says, “Hey, you know what, let's give these people bad leads and see what happens. Don't tell anybody. This will be a stitch.” They're working hard to try and generate the right opportunities for you. And, if you don't give them feedback, nothing's going to change. 

So, we need to provide that feedback loop in not a critical way, but in a constructive way that says, “Hey, here's what was good about that opportunity. It was this, this this that. What we found, though, is that when we keep getting leads and a person at this level in the organization, oftentimes that that isn't right, and they become an impediment to us. And, once we contacted them if we go around them, it doesn't look right. So, when you get those people from marketing side, if you can figure out who else to contact, the organization, we would rather start at that level higher up and go down. We may be starting too low in the organization.” That's a constructive conversation that you can have. But. if you just say, “Oh, this is a bad lead.” Okay, what was bad about it? 

It's like if you went to a restaurant and said, “You know, this isn't good. What don't you like about it? I just don't like it. Okay, well, so what should I order instead?” Well, what didn't you like about what I brought you the first time? Otherwise, I'm going to bring you something. It's the same thing. So, it's like you say, I didn't like this. They bring you another dish and you say, “I don't like this one, either. Why not? Well, I don't like things with sauce on it. They both had sauce.” Well, if you told me, you didn't like the first dish because it had sauce, I wouldn't have given you a second dish with sauce. But you didn't tell me. You just said you didn't like it. I made a totally different dish. The only common attribute is that they both have that sauce. I didn't know any better. There's the problem. So, I think that level communication is critical.

14:23 Meridith

I do too. And I think that I've always felt marketing is a little bit afraid of sales, in the sense that I think a lot of people in the company see sales as something that's scary to do, and you don't mess with the salespeople, because they're revenue producing Well, the truth is, if marketing would come in and really spend some time shadowing with sales, go on a call with them, see what it's like to live in their world, you’ll do a better job of applying your expertise. 

If I were running a sales and marketing team and I really wanted them to align, I would begin by requiring each side to gain tremendous respect for what the other side does, and to go spend time seeing it from their point of view. Because, I think, the biggest waste in organizations is that sales are doing things that they should allow marketing to do, and marketing is creating things without intimately understanding what it means to sell.

15:23 Ian

It's interesting that my top performing clients, what I find is that not only are their salespeople in the Same Side Selling Academy, but their marketing teams are as well. And they will say to me, can we tailor a course inside of the Academy just for our marketing people, so they understand how we sell and the terminology that our team uses so we're better aligned. No shock to you and me, those teams outperform every other team, because they're so much joined at the hip, that there isn't this back and forth. They're saying, “Oh, so you probably need a tool like this, you need that.” And now, they're having regular communications between sales and marketing. So, it's not a matter of saying, oh, sales and marketing should be aligned. They actually are aligned because they're having lunch together. They're communicating on a regular basis. They're involved in each other's meetings. They really intimately understand each other's challenges, and they can offer areas to help.

16:24 Meridith

Yeah, so, so true. We just live in a world that is so busy today. It's so competitive. There's no way that a sales team can do all the things that marketing has the capability to do for them. And marketing has so much opportunity to really elevate the sales team if they'll get in there and truly understand what they do.

16:46

Alright, so we covered a lot of stuff. I'm going to do my best to try and recap this in about 30 to 60 seconds, which could be a challenge, and hopefully you've got my back for whatever I leave out.

So, when we're trying to align sales and marketing, the first thing is, we actually need to talk to one another. It's we can't have sales on one end of the business and marketing and the other end and the two never meet. We need to make sure they're aligned together.

Sales and marketing need to communicate their expectations together. So, before you do an event, sales needs to be able to sit down with marketing and agree on what is a good outcome at the end of the meeting, as well as 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. 

When it comes to giving feedback, when you get leads from marketing, you need to have a feedback loop that says here's what's working for us and here's what isn't. Not just by complaining, but by providing that level of constructive feedback. And ultimately, what you want to do is make sure that you're sitting in on each other's meetings. I don't think there should be a single marketing meeting without at least one representative from sales, nor do I think there should be a single sales meeting without a representative from marketing. That way you understand each other's world, there's better empathy, and to your point, having mutual respect between sales and marketing is what leads to those top performing teams. So, what did I miss Meridith?

18:05

Well, I think you wrapped it together. I think you really hit on everything. The only thing I'm going to add is, that if you are in charge of the sales team, if you're in charge of the marketing team, it starts at the top with leadership. If you work together, your teams will work together. The alignment begins with you. The last thing I'm going to add is this is to your competitive advantage. As you said, your top performing teams have strong sales and marketing alignment. If you're looking for opportunity in 2021/2022, this is it.

18:39 Ian

Fantastic. Meridith, where do people learn more about you?

18:43 Meridith

They can find me at my website, which is just the words ValueSpeaker.com or I tend to live on LinkedIn.  I'm a big believer in build your network, change your life. So, if you reach out and connect with me, I will connect with you.

18:59 Ian

And, of course, you can visit me at SameSideSelling.com. Be sure to check out the Same Side Selling Academy and I’m always on LinkedIn. When you reach out on LinkedIn, just drop a note that says, “Hey, I heard you on the Same Side Selling podcast, so I don't think you're just someone trying to connect to me to try and sell me something in a bad way that becomes an example for a future podcast.” So, thanks so much. Best wishes for everybody in aligning your sales and marketing. We'll see you on the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. Bye now. 

00:04 Ian

Hi, it's Ian Altman. Welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast, I am joined by the talented, brilliant Meridith Elliott Powell. We are talking today about the notion of follow-up in sales. Something that is often the scene of epic failures. Before we get into that, Meridith, can you give people a little bit of your background, so they have a sense of just how brilliant you are?

00:29 Meridith

Yeah, I don't know, you set me up really well. I'm a business growth and sales strategist, and my passion is helping my clients turn all of this uncertainty into their competitive advantage.

00:41 Ian

And most people know that I'm probably best recognized for this book I co-wrote with Jack Quarles, called Same Side Selling. It’s all about how we turn those adversarial traps where buyer and seller are butting heads together, and how we get people on the same side, working together, kind of putting a puzzle together. 

So Meridith, we're talking about this idea of sales follow-up. I know this is a topic that you're passionate about and teach a lot about. So, kick us off. What are the biggest mistakes that you see people make when it comes to sales follow-up?

01:13 Meridith

Let's just start with a simple one. They don't. They don't follow up. I mean, they might once or twice, but they don't stay in it for the long game. I am just a passionate believer that the sale happens in the follow-up. It always happens in the follow-up.

01:30 Ian

What do you mean by that when you say that people don't follow up? I often say that the way people follow up today often sounds like this, “Hey I'm just calling to check in and see if you made a decision yet?” And you're basically a tin cup and a cardboard sign away from begging at that point. It's like, just start investing in Sharpies and cardboard. It’s like, “Just checking in. God bless.” I mean, we need a better way to follow up. So, when you say people don't follow-up, what do you mean?

02:00 Meridith

Well, let's just say, “Just checking in,” and “God bless,” are probably two statements that shouldn't be used in follow-up.

But I guess what I mean is the fact that, first of all, we've all heard the research that the average salesperson gives up after two to three times. It takes a person eight to 10 touches or messages to make a decision. I don't know where that research comes from. I can't cite it at this point. 

But, let's get into it this way, what do you think the chances are that you're going to interact with a customer at the exact moment they are ready to buy? Like they got up this morning, looked in the mirror and said, “Please God, if nothing else happens to me today, please let a sales rep call me.” The chances of that are like slim to none. 

Even if you have a really great conversation, even if I call on you, and boy, you are just hot to buy, by the time I get off that zoom call, I walk out of your office, what happens is, all of a sudden, your best customer just brought a really big deal into your office, your top employee just fell and broke her leg, and she's going to be out for the next couple of weeks, and your kid got a D on his report card. All of a sudden, the conversation you had with me is no longer a priority. 

So then I reached out once or twice, you don't respond, and I assume that hot conversation was a figment of my imagination, you went somewhere else, or you're no longer interested. None of which is true.

03:33 Ian

Yeah, you know, it's a great perspective that I think is lost on a lot of people. I'll ask reps, “So right after you left the office, what do you think happened?” And people will guess, and all sorts of things. And I say, “Look, it's simpler than that: life happened”. Someone got in a car accident, or like you said, their child had a D. Somebody is pregnant. It could be good news; it could be bad. It doesn't matter. The point is that something happened that took their attention away from whatever it is that you were hoping to sell. It doesn't mean that what you were hoping to help them solve isn't important anymore. It's just no longer top of mind. And that notion of follow-up then can't be just what we're trying to sell. But instead, it's a perspective of what are we helping them solve? 

I often say that, in the world of sales, you can either show up as someone who's there to sell something, or someone who is there to solve something. We want to make sure we're always showing up as someone who's there to solve, not sell. Because, when I'm following up with somebody, if I'm following up from my reasons, they don't care. If I'm following up for their reasons, now, I might actually have their attention.

04:46 Meridith

I think it needs to be balanced between two things. I used to just think that follow-up was about helping this issue get back to the top of their priority list. Which, I still think it is. That's where you're adding value and making it priority. 

I think it needs to be balanced with making it even easier to buy from you. Making it so simple. Think about how many things you would buy if it was easy to do so. I think about things all the time. Like, the other day, I told you, I put my cell phone in a lake. I can't tell you how complicated it was to get another cell phone. It sucked two days out of my life. If some other carrier would have shown up and said, “We're going to bring the phone to your house. You keep doing what you're doing, and we'll get all your contacts uploaded, and it’s an extra 100 bucks to do it.” I'd have done it without blinking. 

So, when people go dark on you, I think it's partly that it’s no longer a priority. But, I also think it's complicated. They just don't have time and it's not on fire right now.

06:01 Ian

I think that's valuable insight for people to take away. Too often we make it too difficult. Or, we have a meeting, and we might ask all the right questions. We asked them, “What is it that piqued your interest? What were you hoping to solve? What happens if you don't solve that? How important is this compared to other things? What does success look like? Who else who else should we include in this process?” We ask all these great questions. And then, we keep it all to ourselves. 

We don't send a follow-up note that says, “Meridith, in our conversation, I took some detailed notes. I hope you don't mind. This is kind of a long read, but I've summarized everything. Let me know what I got wrong.” Now, we have this detailed document that provides, in essence, a business case for them that says, here's what you told me you're trying to solve, here's why you told me it was important to solve it, here's what success is going to look like, and here's who else would need to get involved. 

Now that I have that information, if I don't hear back from them, I'm not calling up saying, “Hey, just calling to check in. Want to see if you want to buy our stuff.” Instead, I get to call up and say, “So Meridith, I'm looking through my notes. You mentioned that if you didn't solve this it was going to cost your organization $3 million a year. I haven't heard back. I want to make sure I hadn't dropped the ball.” 

Now what happens is you're following up for their reasons. The client or prospect says, “Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, you know, we forgot about that. See, my kid got a D on their report card, I dropped my cell phone in the lake, the dog ate my homework, my kid got in a car accident. I forgot how pressing this was. Thanks for sending me this reminder.”

07:42 Meridith

Exactly. And, you know, sometimes even things as hot as that, they go cold. My favorite follow up email to send, assuming again we had a great conversation and I know I could really do some phenomenal things for your business and that it’s an urgent problem for you. Then, you go dark on me.  I send my business case out…nothing. 

My next email out to you is going to be, “Ian, I know you're busy. I know you've got a lot on your plate. I don't want you to worry about following up with me, I am going to take the burden and I'm going to follow up with you. Every now and then you'll get an email or phone call from me, just sending some things that I think would be of value that are going to help to continue to solve this problem. Don't worry about responding. When you are ready, I want to be there, and I want to be visible to help you out.” 

What I just did with that email is, number one, I bought myself permission to continue to be persistent. The second is, I got the buyer off the hook of going, “Oh my god, Meridith, do you not understand I'm getting 150 emails every 10 minutes, I want to buy from you. But I can't handle you right now.” So, I took the burden off that they have to respond. But, when they're ready to buy, I don’t want them to have to remember who I am, what my contact information is, or how to get ahold of me. Because what's going to happen is my competitor is going to slip in there. And you’re going to be too embarrassed to call me back because you never responded to any of my stuff.

09:16 Ian

I think there's so much great insight there. Here's what I want you to share with people, because I think that some people could go down a scary path with this. When you're now sending that additional information, every week or two -- I want people to pay attention, listen to what Meridith is going to tell you and what type of information she's going to be sending. Because it's not every couple of weeks or every week, “Hey, have you made a decision yet? You need a copy of the PO?”  What type of follow up are you sending them?

09:52 Meridith

Yeah, well, I'm going back to the interview, like you said where I took copious notes and I understand their primary, their secondary and even their tertiary issues, problems, and challenges. And so now I'm sending follow-up information that is value-add. I am sending them an article that I think is of interest for them. I might be inviting them to a presentation that either I'm doing or some of my peers are doing that address the exact issue. I may connect them with somebody that would be a good colleague or peer that I think that they could do business with. I go into 70% value-add mode, where it is all about them. 30% of the time, during that follow up, I ask for the business. It's got to be a combination of both.

I've made the mistake where somebody said “I want to buy from you, but things are crazy right now,” and I just nurtured it. I never went back and directly asked for the business. By the time I did that they'd moved on. But it is that balance I've perfected of 70/30. You make such a great point, please never send a follow-up that says “I'm just checking in.” The moment that's in there, take it out. You might as well be putting four letter words in the follow-up title.

11:11 Ian

Exactly. And we don't just mean sell, sell, sell. I think that what I want to make sure that people get out of this is the notion that we're following up in their interest. 

So, what Meridith pointed to here is this notion of saying, “Hey, you mentioned that you had this challenge. Here's a case study on someone who had that same type of challenge. Here's an article I ran across the other day, that is someone else facing the same thing that you're facing. It doesn't have anything to do with what we sell; I just want you to know that you're not alone.”  And if you're connecting the dots, what happens is, they feel like, you understand the situation better than anybody else.

There's some research that shows that people, especially when they're buying services, are most highly influenced by how well they feel the vendor understands and connects with their situation. The best way we do that is by sharing information that shows that we understand what they're going through.

So, it always cracks me up when companies will go to present to a small to mid-market company, and they give three case studies of how they help Fortune 500 companies. And, I'm thinking, what do you think is going through the buyer's mind at that point? What's going through their mind at that point is, “We're too small for these people, they're not going to give us any attention because they just help bigger companies.” 

So, in my prior business we had a software company, and we sold to large enterprise customers and smaller businesses. When a smaller business would say, “Well, we see how you helped Blue Cross, Blue Shield, and we see how you help this major pharmaceutical company.”  I would say, “You know, we did and the interesting thing is their challenge is very similar to yours. In fact, let me give you an example of this other organization that I think is roughly the same size as you guys there.” So, they had the same problem, in essence, that this big pharmaceutical company had and here's the way we address that. “How similar do you think that is to your situation?”  I'm not saying to them that it’s same as their company. Instead, I share all the attributes, and then I let them decide how similar is that to them? And they say, “Oh, that's just like us.” Then I ask, “Okay, that's great. What do you think some of the differences might be?”  Then they may say, “I don't think there'll be any differences.” And then, what they've just told you is, well, if it worked for them, it's going to work for us. But it was their conclusion. Not us imposing that conclusion on them.

13:49 Meridith

Yeah, you know, you said something so important, which is that people buy from you because you understand them, not because they understand you. I think that is a fatal mistake we make as salespeople, but it's a big one we make in follow-up. We keep trying to convince the buyer why we're the best person to buy from and the best product to buy. When somebody goes dark on you, the first skill you need in sales, at that point, is empathy. You need to do the old Stephen Covey, seek first to understand what's going on.

Because there's two reasons, I think, we don't follow up. Number one is we worry we're going to be annoying. Well, if you reach out to me every couple of days and you're just checking in or asking me if I ready to buy, you're not only annoying, but you are so annoying that even if I want the product and even if I liked you in the initial sale, I'm not going to buy from you because you have irritated the fire out of me. And remember, I control the buying cycle. I can buy the product from somebody else. The other is we assume people aren't interested. We're back to where we started. The moment you walk out of that sales call, virtually or live and in-person, other things happened in their lives. I hope that you are calling on incredibly busy people, because if not, they don't have any money to buy from you anyway. So, you need to understand that they've got a lot going on. Don't take that, personally. This has nothing to do with you. In fact, the sale starts when you get into the follow-up.

15:25 Ian

How does your team measure up against others, when it comes to being on the same side with your clients or prospects? Find out at SameSideSelling.com/Scorecard to take the Same Side Selling assessment. And if you want to learn more about the Same Side Selling Academy visit, SameSideSelling.com. 

15:45 Ian

So many things to unpack there. That idea of the sale starts when you get in the follow-up is something that I think is too often lost. People go meet with somebody, and they assume that they didn't get the sale? So now what? I just move on? It's like, no. You’ve said this in prior episodes -- this idea of look, you're not trying to get married at the first meeting, you're dating. So, you're trying to build some rapport and getting gain comfort. 

The other interesting thing that I've noticed is this is that when you're asking a lot of questions about their situation, and when you take a sincere interest in whether or not there's a fit, the client or prospect actually asks fewer questions about your qualifications, because somebody has to be in the position to evaluate whether or not your skills and services and products are a fit for their needs. If you come in and present everything about you, subconsciously, what happens is they say, “Well, they don't know enough about us. So, I better vet them to see if they're a good fit.” If we ask a ton of questions about their situation, then what happens is the client or prospect says, “Well, they're still talking to us so they must have a good solution because they understand everything about us.” 

They feel like it's now your responsibility, not theirs, to evaluate the opportunity. And it's fascinating, because for my clients who get this down really well, their comment is that the sales cycles happening a whole lot faster, but we're not telling them anything about what we do. And that’s because they don't care. They just want to know that they're in good hands.

17:30 Meridith

Yeah, it's kind of like a death by proposal if you put too much information in there, and you talk too much about yourself. And again, it's back to that notion of follow-up, because follow-up is not about you, it is about them. And it is about saying what can I do to help them understand that what we uncovered was a really significant problem, and what can I do to help them understand our solution can actually make their lives easier? And then, how can I help them understand that we can make this efficient and effective, and not something that's laborsome and time consuming. That it's something we can put into effect and it is actually going to benefit the company in the long run.

That's how you need to think about follow-up. You know Ian, I'm so passionate about follow-up. I feel like it is the lost part of the sales cycle. You can take so much training on identifying your ideal customer profile, on how to prospect, on how to have the right sales conversation, and then the art of the close. But rarely do you go into a company and see that they have a strong follow-up strategy that is methodically thought out about how they'll follow up, what kinds of things they're going to do to add value, how they, kind of, grade their follow-ups into A, B's and C's. There's very little of that. And if you're looking for competitive advantage, it happens in that follow-up.

19:00 Ian

I love that. I think there's just so much value in that. I want to recap all this and try and give a 30-second recap. I'm going to leave ample time for you to fill in the blanks because I know I'm going to miss some of this because there's so much brilliance that you shared, I want to make sure it isn't lost. 

So that first notion is that the biggest mistake people make with follow-up is they just don't do it. They fail to follow-up. Then the second biggest mistake is that when they follow-up, they follow up all about themselves as the seller, instead of having that empathy about what the client's situation is. We didn't recognize that as soon as we're done with the meeting, no matter how well it went, that probably life happened for the client or prospect. Which means we need to follow up in a way that is something that is 70% adding value to your point and 30% remembering to ask for the business. Meaning saying something like “Hey, I've shared this. Does it make sense for us to take a closer look at how we might be able to help you?” That is not a bad way to ask that question to see on the follow-up, and make sure that we're always focusing on where we're adding value for them, and not just talking about ourselves. So, I'm sure there's some stuff that overlooked, Meridith.

20:10 Meridith

I think you did a great job. I think you summed it up with so many of the key points. The only other things that I would add is that, number one, people do business with you, because they understand that you understand them, not because they understand you. You need a strategy. You need to take the time to sit down as a team, and really define how you're going to follow up, and what those value-add pieces are going to be.

I want to throw in one more, just because we didn't talk about it. I'm a big follow-upper with the 11th hour letter. Let's just assume I lost a nice big fat piece of business from you. I don't let the relationship go at that point. I'll reach out and I say, “Ian that was a fabulous choice. You made a good decision. I know you're really going to be happy. If at any point you find you need other services, something additional, or things just don't work out, please feel free to reach back out to me.” And then, t I'm going to stay in touch as well. The reason I do that is that I want to make sure that, at any moment, if the relationship with a vendor doesn't work, they feel comfortable reaching back out to me. Or if there's some other service I could provide I always leave that door open. Just because you lose doesn't mean you're going to lose forever.

21:23 Ian

That that is such great advice. It's something that I haven't heard you share in the past. I love that notion of making sure that, in essence, we don't want to leave on bad terms. So they chose somebody else. That's totally fine. I'm sure you're in great hands. And, if I can be of any service in the future, reach out. I’d love to be able to help. That way they know you’re not bitter about this at all. And then if something doesn't happen, which we know, unfortunately, statistically, is pretty frequent, they feel comfortable coming back to you. They don't feel like they have to come back with their tail between their legs or hat in hand. They can come back with a smile and say, “Yeah, maybe we didn't make the best choice there. We'd love to talk to you again.” That's a brilliant idea. 

So Meridith, what's the best way for people to connect with you and to learn more about how you help different businesses?

22:14 Meridith

Well, I’m a big believer that if you build your network, it will change your life. You can reach me at my website, ValueSpeaker.com or connect with me on the LinkedIn platform. I tend to hang out there more than any other social media channel.

22:30 Ian

Excellent. Likewise, for me, LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. Just mention the Same Side Selling podcast, or be transparent and say, “Hey, I'm just trying to sell you something.” But hopefully, it's someone who's trying to connect with the podcast. And of course, if you visit SameSideSelling.com, you can learn all about the different resources we have available. Meridith thank you again and to our listeners, we will see you on the next episode.

00:04 Ian

Hi, it's Ian Altman. Welcome to the Same Side Selling podcast, your source for integrity-based sales and marketing guidance to help grow your business. I am joined once again, by the talented Meridith Elliott Powell, Meridith can you give people a little bit of your background? By now they should know you, but just in case they don’t.

00:24 Meridith

Well, I am a business, sales, and leadership strategist. My passion is helping my clients turn all of this uncertainty into their competitive advantage.

00:36 Ian

I love it. Most people know me through the book, Same Side Selling, and of course, the Same Side Selling Academy. 

Today I want to focus on something you and I had talked about. We discussed how people are looking at the end of the year, going into the next year. Coming out of the pandemic is when we're recording this. We're talking about mid-2021. In the United States, we're just hopefully finishing up this global pandemic. So, a lot of people are making decisions about how they approach their sales, marketing, and business development. What are some of the big mistakes that you're seeing people make? Then we're going to talk about what people should be doing instead to drive better results. So first, what are those mistakes that you're seeing that people are making? 

01:23 Meridith

You know, I have to say, I love this topic. And I especially love this topic this year because every single person I talked to, we're all turning around and going, “Oh my gosh, I can't believe how fast first quarter went, we're halfway through second quarter. It couldn't move any faster.” I think the biggest mistake you make is you're trying so hard just to keep your head above water in the first two quarters that you don't even think about the third and the fourth quarter. 

Why is that important? Because everything you do in third and fourth quarter is going to determine your success in 2022. So, not realizing that honestly, by this time, if your engine isn't rocking to close a lot of sales this year, keep it going. But realize you're priming the pump more for 2022.

02:15 Ian

I love that perspective. I think that if we look at the pandemic, some businesses really thrived during the pandemic. They had huge opportunities and had explosive growth. I had a client of mine who grew from 42 million last year, and they ended up doing a little over a half a billion because they just were in the right place at the right time. People needed personal protective equipment that they happened to actually have a source for. So, it just it worked out great. They were able to capitalize on that. 

Many other businesses struggled. I think that one of the things that we see is that people went from being proactive and strategic, to reactive and tactical. So, they started just responding to any opportunity or any place they can grab revenue. That's what they went after, even if it wasn't good revenue. 

That's something that I want to talk about a little bit: the difference between revenue in general and the right revenue. I think, for a lot of businesses, the mistake they make is they think any revenue is good. But sometimes we have those toxic clients or sometimes we get the clients who aren't necessarily the right strategic fit. Those are the people who end up being the bane of our existence. They suck us into the vortex of evil and it sucks all the energy out of our business. So, do you have some thoughts on that in terms of just revenue versus the right revenue?

03:41 Meridith

 Yeah, all the more reason you need to be planning for third and fourth quarter, because if not, you wind up more with revenue rather than the right revenue. As you're heading toward the end of the year, you want to make your quota, you want to hit your goal. So, you start grabbing at anything. 

The other thing I think is that we're all salespeople, right?  And for salespeople, it's the thrill of the chase. Sometimes when you reject me, it almost turns me on more. I want to try to land that deal even more than I did before. But, if I don't catch myself, because we have all done this, you have landed that deal, you get that high, you talk to that customer into it, and, oh my God, did they make you pay for it 20 times over. You thought you won, but you just realized you signed your own death sentence. So, it's all the more reason you want to plan. I always say you need to be selling from a place of power rather than a place of need. As you head into third and fourth quarter, to use your term, it's not about chasing revenue, it's about chasing the right revenue.

04:46 Ian

Part of it is, how do we attract those clients for whom we can have the greatest impact? Because let's face it, depending on what your business is, not everybody is the right fit for you. The sooner you realize that the better. I spent time actually with a client of mine earlier today. And, I said, “Let's come up with a list of criteria of those organizations who are the best fit. Those organizations who you'll never have a debate about whether or not you're adding value for them. And whether you do it uniquely compared to the competition.” They said, “Well, I mean, gee, those are our are the ideal clients for us.: Yeah, they look like this, but that's not everybody. I said, “Okay. How many of those types of organizations do you think exist out there?” They thought about it. I said, “Well, I mean, we just don't know who they are, but there's probably 1000s of them.” 

So now that we know that, now we're going to figure out how to attract those people to you. That’s where we develop these types of strategic plans on how to pursue those types of opportunities. So, to me, it's almost less chasing, and it's more, how do we magnetize? How do we create this incredibly powerful magnet to attract those ideal clients to us? For many businesses, the sales cycle is not three hours, or three days, or three weeks. It could be three months, it could be three quarters, or whatever it is. So, we need to start planting seeds now so we can harvest later. 

06:14 Ian

How does your team measure up against others when it comes to being on the same side with your clients or prospects? Find out at SameSideSelling.com/Scorecard to take the Same Side Selling assessment. And if you want to learn more about the Same Side Selling Academy, visit same SameSideSelling.com

06:35 Meridith

My favorite exercise to do with my clients is I say, write down your top 10 clients. Write down those clients that if the phone rang right now and it was them, they bring a smile to your face. If you got up in the morning, and you thought you were going to spend time with them you'd actually be looking forward to it. They love your products. They never dicker with you on price. They understand the value you bring to the table. 

The moment you write 10 of them down, you'll start to see themes about them. They may or may not work in the same industry, but they usually hold a certain position in a company. There is a certain type of person. I know for me, a lot of my clients are weekend athletes, they're family-based people, they're typically at the top of the game in their company, they've done really well, but they want to push it and take it to another level. They're tear them all apart, let's take it to another level, type of people.

The moment I intimately understand them, then I can start to use the things that attracted them to attract people just like them. The writings, they were attracted to, the way that I sold them, the way I positioned products. It almost becomes like a crack a code or a crack a puzzle. If I can put together the pieces of how I won that business in the beginning, it is going to tell me how to win business of customers that are just like them.

08:02 Ian

I love them. So, that could be the first step for people. Rather than thinking about who you want as clients, look at who your best clients are today and find common attributes for those. Then, the next step can be, now that we know the criteria and what attributes make up our ideal clients, now we want to think about where do those people hang out? How do we attract and get in front of more people like that?

Because if nothing else, now that we know what those attributes are. We already have existing clients who would be great references for those clients. We'll get to the idea of referrals a little bit later. But the idea is that even without the direct referrals -- which certainly if you're doing well, you'll get direct referrals -- we want to think, so if these are the attributes, where do I find other people like that? 

People often say, “Oh, well, I can't buy a list like that.” Well, can you log into LinkedIn? I mean, it's already there in front of you. You just have to do a little bit of work. So, start with that notion of making sure that we know which of our clients are the ones that put a smile on our face, that we say, “Wow, this is a great client.” And then, we want to think about where do those people hang out and who else is like them? What other thoughts should people be looking at for planning that end of this year? Going into next?

09:26 Meridith

Well, you know, I think the I think the other thing, too, is the fact that for some sales professionals, that can get scary, because in essence, what we're telling you to do is niche. To really focus in on a specific type of client. But let's talk a moment about why that works. 

Think about when Amazon started. I mean, Amazon basically said we're going to sell books online. For most of us, we thought that was insane. You go downtown to buy a book. You like the experience of sitting in the bookstore. So, Amazon did not try to sell to us. They knew their ideal customer. And, once they knew that ideal customer, they sold to them and allowed them to sell the rest of us on the idea.

Because, you know, as Ian said, we're going to get into referrals. You have to make people happy before you can get referrals. And the reason you want to know this ideal is because this is who you can make happy. 

Now the third step I think you need to take beyond that is you need to go back to those top 10 clients, and you need to have a conversation with them to intimately understand the problems they're facing right now. Because, if you're going to attract more people like them, you need to understand what the current problems are. Far too often, we're way too comfortable with our existing customers. Hopefully, we've reached a relationship where, if they have a problem, they'll call us. We don't necessarily have to work as hard because we did so much work on the front end. But they can become a goldmine, for you, of information. They can tell you what to write about, what videos to shoot, what places to go, and what to talk about that's going to attract people just like them.

11:13 Ian

Meridith, I love that you touched on this idea of focusing on the problems that they're facing right now. Very often, I'll ask somebody, “Well, so, what problem do you solve for this customer? And, their response is, “Well, what we do for them is we do this and this and this”. I'm like, No, no. Not, what do you do for them? That part is easy. From their perspective, looking through their lens what do you solve for them or what are the problems they are facing that you're not solving, and no one else is today? Because that's the mindset that I believe is critical when we're reaching out and trying to attract new business. 

If we use a medical metaphor, I think of it this way. We're not just going out peddling our treatment, saying, “Hey, do you want amoxicillin, do you want amoxicillin?” Instead, we want to look at it as, what are the symptoms that might be an indication of a condition that we're really good at treating? So, we don't want to say to people, yeah, we have a treatment for carpal tunnel syndrome, because most people who have carpal tunnel syndrome don't know it. But, if we said, “Our clients come to us when they have numbness in their fingers, when they maybe have discomfort when they're typing, when they're playing with family members, or playing sport. That could be an indication of something called carpal tunnel syndrome, or two other conditions. We've had great success in helping people solve that. Well, now someone says, “Yeah, I do have that symptom. I wonder if it is that condition. It sounds like they're good at treating it.”.

So, we always have to lead with the problems that we solve or the symptoms that we treat. I think that the trap that a lot of people fall into is they describe their treatment, or their product and service, or dare I say, features and benefits, when the reality is that if people don't think they have the condition, they don't care about the treatment.

13:00 Meridith

The other thing I think that sales professionals need to understand, we all need to understand, is that the condition is constantly changing. In an uncertain marketplace, it is constantly changing. Ian, right before we started this podcast, I was on a sales call with a client of mine who's an ideal client. I love her, she loves me. She refers me a ton of business. I was just checking in with her to kind of see where we are on things. We're working on a project. And I said, “Tell me some of the roadblocks you're running into?” She sells a piece of technology, and she said, “People just don't feel they can get their sales teams to make the culture shift in order to sell”. Now, I sell sales training. What I do with her a lot is sales training. But I immediately heard, I have to solve the problem to help her sales team understand how to convey to make a culture shift. All of a sudden, not only am I going to solve the problem for her, but she also gave me a great idea to go out attract clients like her, because this is the current pain point. Now when I had talked to her three months ago, this was not the problem. You have to stay on top of it.

14:10 Ian

I love that. So, we need to make sure that we're checking in with our clients on a regular basis.

Now, I mentioned that we will come back to referrals. One of the things is that, when we have those 10 clients, who we've had great results for and we've got a great relationship, and we adore those people. I'll give you the approach that I tend to take with my clients, and then I encourage them to take with their clients. Then, I'll give you opportunity for rebuttal on different strategies because there's more than one way to approach this. 

So, the approach that I often take or tell my clients to take is this notion of the first thing we want to do is confirm the results that they're seeing. So, we say to them, “Well, I know when we started working together here's what we were hoping to achieve. Zero to 10, how well do you feel we've done that? Because if they tell you well it's been like a six, they're probably not going to be a great referral source right now. So first of all, make sure that they're thrilled with what we've done. Then, what we want to do is we want to say, “So remind me, this is the challenge you were facing at the time, right? Yeah. Okay. Can you think of one or two other individuals or organizations like you, who might be facing that same type of challenge, and would like to be in the same place that you are right now?” The reason I do it that way is that if I ask, “Can you think of anybody,” your brain creates this kind of amorphous bucket of people. If I asked you, “Can you think of one or two other people, your brain creates an ordered list with a slot or someone in the one slot with specific names. Then they're likely to say, “Oh, yeah, I can think of two people right away -- this person and that person. Then I ask, “What's the most comfortable way for you to make that introduction? Would you rather do it via email, or via phone, or to schedule a lunch together?”

Now, what we're doing is, we're turning this conceptual idea into action. The beauty is that then we say, “Would you like us to send you a draft intro? Of course, you can edit it, I just want to make it as easy for you as possible.” And your note says, for example, if someone was referring to you, Meridith, would be, “Oh, we had this issue we're facing. We reached out to Meridith who really helped us solve it. From our past discussions, I have a feeling this might also apply to your business, and I thought you might appreciate the introduction.” 

What you notice there is that they're not doing us a favor by making the introduction. They're doing a favor to the people who might be experiencing that same challenge. So, it's not like, hey, can this person call and harass you for the next six months. It is here is someone who might be able to help you.

16:47 Meridith

Now I absolutely love that's it. That's a fantastic approach. The typical approach, I take it, I have about three different ways that I approach it. Number one is, before I close out a contract, if I'm doing training or I'm doing consulting, I'm always keenly aware of their vendors, partners and who they're connected to in the association. Every client I've got has buddies that they work with. Usually not a competitor. Somebody maybe in another state, on the other side of the country, or even somewhere else in the world. So, I'm keenly aware of that just in the fact that you've been pretty close to them in the conversation. So as soon as I make them happy, and we achieve the results we achieve, I might say, “Ian, this has been fabulous working with you, and I really want to work with more people like you. I noticed that both Tracy and Savoya are both two people that you work really closely together with and I'm thinking that we could do the same type of work for them. Would you be open to making that connection?” Now, usually, I rarely get any problem at all. If I do get any pushback then I go to my third choice. 

I'll tell you, my second is to just getting a really good testimonial, because I might reach out to Tracy or somebody by using social proof by saying that I just finished working with your company and use it as an introduction. I'll use that testimonial as social proof with the next person to open the door. “Ian suggested I reach out to you, but Ian doesn't necessarily want to get involved.

The last way I approach it is fairly open and fairly simple. A lot of this I do for my keynote speaking engagements, because I'm only going to go in there typically to do one keynote, and most likely, they won't have me back next year. I make a referral to them of who they should have on stage next year. So, it takes the problem off the table for them. And I say, “I know you work with a lot of other meeting planners; I'd love to have a connection to work with other meeting planners just as great as you, would you keep me in mind?”

18:55 Ian

That's great. That's great. So that wraps up that whole notion of referrals. So, I want to recap all the stuff that we talked about here so that people have a concise way to do this. So, I'm going to do my best to recap things. I generally forget stuff and leave things out, so Meridith, hopefully you'll back me up after this and, and clean up the mess that I create trying to try to do this recap. Here's the key stuff. 

First is, when we're planning for the end of this year, going into next year, the first place you want to look is your top clients right now. Who are the people that make you smile? And in that way, we're getting an idea of the profile and the attributes of our ideal client. Then, we think about where might those people exist elsewhere in the world and how do we connect to those people? 

We want to think about connecting to our existing clients and think about the problems or challenges that they are facing today so we can talk about and describe those symptoms that we're going to be treating. 

Then, when it comes to referrals, we want to reach back out to our existing clients. First, make sure they're really satisfied. Then, we give you a couple different approaches for how to get those referrals. One of which is, “Hey, I noticed you worked with these people and those people. Are those the kind of people who might benefit from what I do as well?” The other side is, “Hey, who else is having this same type of challenge who might appreciate the same outcome that we've delivered for you?” 

What did I miss Meridith?

20:19 Meridith

I think I think you did a fantastic job. The only thing that I would add, is take all this, use the time now to create the strategy for third and fourth quarter. You're going to need the energy to keep your foot on the gas. You're going to need to be proactive. So, take the time now to be methodical about who you want to call on, why you want to call on them, what your approach is going to be, and what your ask is going to be, as far as getting referrals. You do that and you're going to finish 2021 strong and you're going to start 2022 off even better.

20:56 Ian

Fantastic. So Meridith, where can people learn more about you and connect to you?

21:01 Meridith

Well, they can find me at my website, which is ValueSpeaker.com or follow me on LinkedIn. I tend to live on that social media channel. I'm a big believer - build your network, change your life. So, if you reach out and connect with me, I will connect with you.

21:18 Ian

Fantastic and please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. If there's another Ian Altman, I'm not aware of them, but I'm pretty easy to spot on LinkedIn. And of course, at SameSideSelling.com. We will see you on the next episode of the Same Side Selling podcast. Bye.