5: Messaging and Trade Shows

hey everybody it's john barrows with make it happen mondays episode five coming at you from beautiful irvine texas i'm actually um down here for a conference that i gotta put on here in about an hour so might have to cut this one brief but we'll see uh see how the questions go but um today i wanted to chat with you about um messaging and also trade shows i was bummed out like i did uh rainmaker uh 2017 or yeah rainmaker 17 last week um sales lofts conference and there's about eight nine hundred people there and it was a fantastic conference and um i gave a speech on the divide between sales and marketing and what i felt like the missing link was and it was revolving around messaging and i actually realized i missed out on a huge opportunity to do facebook live for that um because the presentation was about 45 minutes long and um got some really good feedback on it so i gotta again just learn and try to stay top of mind with this stuff i should probably do this a little bit more often and uh do some facebook live stuff outside of make it happen monday so be on the lookout for that anytime i'm doing a presentation especially at a conference i'm going to be trying to light that up so everybody else can get some value out of it too so with that i was going to just summarize a little bit of what i talked about and then also talk about trade shows because trade shows selling and follow-up is a little different than obviously cold calling and prospecting so um and then obviously open it up for any questions that anybody has all the time and i'm going to be monitoring that and answer whatever you guys have out there so anyways um the the divide between sales and marketing i think comes at the if you go old school right and you go to um glengarry glenross again if you haven't seen that movie don't watch it it's a depressing ass movie uh but watch the best eight minutes of alec baldwin's entire career just go in there and and uh type in youtube glengarry glenross and you'll see what i'm talking about you know in there he talks about a uh always be closing whatever but he also talks about the fundamental process of sales which is aida attention interest desire action and you know if you really that is the actual fundamental process of sales it's the first thing i looked it up um a guy by the name of 18 a guy in 1898 a guy whose name was uh saint elmo saint elmo lewis came up with this and he said these are the four mental stages we all need to go through before we buy something first something needs to get our attention then we have to be interested in it then we have to have a desire for it and then we have to move to act so if we really think about how long do we have to get someone's attention in today's world you know we have seconds to get people's attention i mean you look at your iphone right you look at the name of the person in the subject line if you don't know that if you don't know the name of the person you don't know the subject line you move on right or you delete it same thing with those auto dialers these days where you're getting calls and you have to say hello twice right so you go hello and there's a pause while your information comes up on their screen and then you have to say hello twice you know the second time almost 100% of people i know after they have to say hello that second time they hang up so we literally have seconds to get their attention and that earns us an extra couple of minutes where we can talk a little bit about you know maybe ask them a question or two or give them a stronger value proposition and in that two minutes that's what earns us a meeting right whether it's 15 minutes over the phone or 60 minutes in person doesn't really matter much now by the way small nuggets and stuff here don't sell meetings when you guys are reaching out to existing or new i don't care um because if you think about if you're asking for a meeting how long is that usually 30 minutes if not an hour nobody has any good feelings about meetings so when you say i'd like to meet with you effectively what you're saying is i want to take an hour of your time and flush it down the toilet and we're probably going to want it back are we good so instead sell time think about it when you're prospecting you are not selling your products or services you are selling the next step you are selling time so quantify what you're asking for hey what's the best way to get 10 minutes on your calendar what's the best way to get 30 minutes on your calendar right that's what we're selling when prospecting and so i lay that foundation because if you look at aida and sales and marketing marketing usually does a really good job with the air cover stuff um to drive that inbound attention and then they do a decent job once we have somebody's attention like once we're like okay um you know sure john tell me what you got but you know case studies those type of things marketing usually does a really good job there where i think marketing tends to miss and i think where sales needs the most help is that a phase for me as a sales rep literally when i am making an outbound call or sending an email what do i say to get someone's attention like what are the words that come out of my mouth in the first 5 to 15 seconds of that conversation to have somebody say sure tell me more how do you do that and that's really what i tried to focus on at the sales loft conference was what i call attention grabbers right not elevator pitches elevator pitches suck in so many ways at least historical ones you know the ones that we've been uh taught they're usually way too long super cheesy all about us right and they're really general in nature in a lot of ways so i call about i talk about attention grabbers like literally what can you say in in one sentence ideally that can get somebody to say all right tell me more how do you do that and so the characteristics are short you know you want periods and commas of the enemies you tell me you do this and this and this and this i self-select and say i'm all set um so specific targeted the more targeted you are with your message the better results you're going to get you know concept here is cios in the healthcare industry have different priorities and cios in the manufacturing industry if i understand what those priorities are i can speak that language and i can come up with messaging that's a little bit more specific to them um obviously if i do research on them and i'm very specific that's the best case scenario um you gotta have it so it's conversational you know so it's not a pitch nobody likes pitches um the other piece here is what others say about you is way better than what you say about you all right what our marketing department say us being you say about us being you know leading provider of whatever you know who cares you know what gartner says about us being in the fourth quadrant yay you know third party validation but the number one thing that we have and the best material that we have is what other people say about us what our customers say about you and that goes back to also what's unique about your business what's unique about your solution and once we get into the middle of the sales process that's where the real uniqueness comes out that's where we can really kind of uncover the client's needs and and really pinpoint how our solution is different and can solve them but on the prospecting side when we're reaching out to them it's real hard to to differentiate yourself right because all of our competitors can kind of say the same thing they can kind of they they they could even lie about it just to get that conversation going you know we say oh we have the better faster cheaper whatever our people are the difference you know that type of thing like do you think your competitors are out there going look our technology is awesome but our people suck oh my god our people are horrible right i mean they're saying the things that we are but there's one thing they have a really hard time lying about and that's what's unique about each and every one of us and it's the results we drive for our customers that is the number one unique factor of that all of us have especially in the prospecting side of the house and that is the easiest thing we can use to create messaging that gets people's attention and so what i talked about at rainmaker and i'd share with you here is if you're trying to come up with messaging throw away the elevator pitch nobody gives a rat's ass about how great you are or how about you're the leading provider of or any of that crap the only thing people care about is them and potentially other people like them and because i don't have a ton of information about you directly up front i'm going to take a swing at using some other analogies of people like you and seeing if i can get you to bite so as an example the way i create messaging is i reverse engineer case studies i look at a case study look at the bottom of a case study and say okay what was the result that we drove for that client so we showed this company and that turns into my attention grabber so i want to be able to say hey we showed this company in your industry how to drive these type of results and i'd like to talk to you about it and i want to stay away from stuff like on average our clients see a whatever 32 percent increase or up to a whatever that's all marketing speak let them have that when it comes to sales i want to be able to say look you fit a profile somebody that we've done some awesome work with as a matter of fact this company in your industry we were able to show them how to do this and i'd love to have that conversation with you all right that is what potentially could get somebody to say how do you do that right and that's the goal with our messaging is we're trying to get somebody when we say whatever we do we're trying to get somebody to say tell me more how do you do that all right and that's how i create those attention grabbers it's the easiest way to do it now if you don't have case studies go get some you have clients i mean unless you're a brand new startup company with zero clients and if that's the case i would do everything i can to go find that ideal customer profile and offer my services to those clients at a probably a pretty heavy discount in return for a case study or a testimonial that i can then go and spread the word to everybody else but unless you're that startup you have customers you might not have a full-blown marketing department that can go out and get formal case studies but you have customers that are happy hopefully my recommendation go talk to them go grab lunch with them ask them hey if somebody were to ask you what we do for you what would you say and if you can put any quantifiable metrics around that that'd be fantastic or just simply say hey what were you doing before us and then what you're doing after us and that when what was the difference whatever they tell you take that go find a bunch of clients that fit that profile and call them all up and say the same damn thing hey we i was just talking to one of my customers at lunch and they said before us they were doing this after us they were doing this and i'd love to chat with you about it because you fit a very similar profile that messaging right there allows you to try out different things allows you to be very specific and again don't focus on what you can do to help them you have no idea what you can do to help somebody that you're reaching out to who you don't know but what you can say is you've helped other people like them and get them to make that connection all right so that's really what i was you know focusing on it at rainmaker is to try to because i was sick of all these technologies and all these you know people talking about all these new processes and technologies and stuff to to solve this problem between sales and marketing and i don't think you need it i mean this problem's been going on forever i've been in sales for 20 years i have a marketing degree i have a marketing background i've been hearing about the divide between sales and marketing for 20 years and it hasn't gotten any better i still hear the same shit so so forget about the technologies all that other stuff a nice easy way is to for instance have marketing come in and do a lunch and learn for us in sales and say okay here's the persona we're going after this is the person right this is what they care about in 2017 right not in general but in 2017 this is what cmos in the financial services industry are really focused on here's a case study that we have that supports that now here's an attention grabber right again the bottom result here's two or three questions that we can ask that person specifically because it you know so to show we know what we're talking about right you don't want to just say hey tell me about your priorities you know you want to be hey we're working with cmos in the financial services industry and they're telling us that the top three priorities are x y and z are those yours right and then we got a story to tell so marketing does that lunch and learn helps us in sales learn something right and then we come up with that message and then everybody from one o'clock to two o'clock crushes the phones right and everybody says the same thing hey we show cmos in the financial services industry how to rinse repeat rinse repeat rinse repeat and everybody tracks it and just how many calls how many referrals how many meetings and by doing this all at the same time first of all the energy's there everybody kind of gets around going around and learning from each other and then we can track the results so we can say there's immediate feedback to marketing about how that messaging worked because that's the other missing link is that the feedback loop from sales to marketing all right so that's you know one of the things that a couple of things that i was hitting on with rainmaker and hopefully people got some value out of that um the other thing and this just ties into it and then we're going to look at questions here but um the other thing is trade shows right like and how those attention grabbers i actually think fit perfectly in trade shows by the way if you are not going to networking events or trade shows i really recommend you do and it's not necessarily to to find business right if you can find business at them that's fantastic but the the goal is to practice specifically at networking events trade shows you should be able to find some business if you go to the right targeted ones but networking events you go to practice because over the phone you're only dealing with and there's statistics around this the way that we communicate as human beings is broken down 8 35 57 8 of the way that we communicate is through the words that we use 35 is the tonality and how we use those words and the other 57 is body language so over the phone you're only dealing with 43 of the way that people communicate right in person you're dealing with a hundred so when i tell you when somebody says john what do you do and you start blabbing away and i watch your eyes glaze over right or i watch you look right around here instead of here or if i watch you drink your beer a little bit faster than you were drinking it before what do you think's happening you you over the phone so that's why i love networking events to go practice what do you do and this is where those attention grabbers come in super handy because you can practice so like for instance dreamforce my number one networking event it's vps of sales in the sas industry right my direct target audience at my number one client's biggest event well when somebody says john what do you do i don't say we do sales training consulting for fortune 500 companies it guarantees you the results you're looking for at every stage of the sales process like yeah who wants to hear that so again going back to the characteristics of attention grabbers short specific um conversational um you're looking for a what or tell me more how do you do that when somebody when a vp of sales at dreamforce tells ask me john what do you do attention grabber mine i train salesforce how to sell what response do you think i get a hundred percent of the time when i tell a vp of sales at dreamforce i train salesforce how to sell tell me more how do you do that you know it's interesting you know i've trained probably about 5 000 their sales professionals on prospecting techniques to drive immediate business into the pipeline it's all about doing a little bit of homework on them you know you know firing off an email to an executive getting a referral down you get about a 15 to 20 response rate doing it having a good time interesting john tell me more actually you know what now that i got your attention i know you're interested why don't we take a step back here and talk a little bit about your situation and see if it makes sense for us to take the next steps you know it's a mess around here um you know dreamforce with so many people and and you probably want to get around to talk to as many people as you can so why don't we just set something up for next week you know what um you got your iphone on you i know you do you can call them out right there like again remember what we're selling aida attention and interest at these events on the phone anywhere you're not selling your products or services you are selling the next step you were selling time so that's what i do i go ai close on 15 minutes ai close on 15 minutes and i make it awkward on you too it's like hey um i see that you know you got your iphone on you why don't we just pick a time next week and i'm like i see it in your pocket right because if you weren't interested then why did you say you were if you were you're going to take out and we're going to book some time so my calendar after an event like last week is littered with 15 minute qualification calls and i almost said none of those hey it was great meeting you at rainmaker i'd love to follow up with you in those template crap that nobody responds to so i really try to focus on gaining action in that moment at the event and so when i strike up those conversations using those attention grabbers then obviously i try to qualify them as i'm doing it sorry something on my screen there um then i'll be just i try to qualify it's like hey what's your role what kind of industry and those type of things and just pick up on anything that i can that i can reference later when i do send that email because i don't want to send the template email i want to show that i paid attention so what i usually do is i grab a um you know say this is a business card i always have my pen with me when i'm at these events and after you and i have a conversation hopefully we lock something up what i'm going to do is i'm going to take your business card flip it over and on the back just write a couple of key points that we had a conversation about if you're really good if i liked you i'm going to take a i'm going to fold up your business card on the corner there so that when i um sift through the 10 20 30 40 business cards i have at the end of the week i'm going to find the ones that have the the uh the fold in the corner and those are the ones i'm going to follow up specifically with immediately um and take it from there but again hopefully i've got them scheduled on a call if not i do that all right so go back to trade shows practice different attention grabbers practice getting people to say what or tell me more and time your conversations make sure that even if you find an awesome account like an awesome prospect don't let that conversation go for 10 20 30 minutes again you can't sell in that moment you can you can sell time you can't sell your solutions right so don't try to close them on anything other than the next step all right so that's it from uh from last week let's see what people have some questions on so i go hey bobby what's up man um so sup john uh my sales process as an ae starts with the bottom of the chain and ideally works its way up to the cxos the struggle is getting that to that point what ways do you suggest messaging to them through the champions sending cxo specific case studies and trusting the champ to send the meeting up for you go over the champ's head yeah bobby this is um this is one of the hard i think this is one of the hardest things to do in sales which is go over somebody's head without pissing them off um that's why i've always liked the top down approach right because the bottom up approach is pretty brutal especially as it relates to to getting to that point because a lot of times we we kind of go through and you know we might deal with somebody down here that makes all the sense in the world but then as we bubble this up top to look for budget we get smacked so that's personally why my initial approach is always to start at the top not because i sell there but because it's easier to go back up when i need to so for instance i go after a cxo and i don't sell them i just say something cool enough to get their attention say yeah by the way who can i talk to about this and then get pushed down and then if i need to i can go back up right because if you take a look at um if you go on my blog and type in uh favorite nugget j barrows you'll see that summary email is one of my favorite things because get referral from here to here have this conversation summarize this conversation fire up back up there just as a pure courtesy i don't even have to try i don't even have to ask this person right this is a hey this person gave me the referral i'm just going to keep them updated on our conversation and then if this person goes dark on you you have that open avenue to go back so that's my preferred way of doing it now if bobby you're starting at the bottom and you're building your way up a couple of things to look for here one is look for the type of person that you're engaging with at the bottom and i i always do my profile of like hey who is this person i take a look at their linkedin profile that type of stuff and what i'm looking for there is is are they on are they on their way up okay in the sense that it you know if this person's had the same job for the past 20 years or 10 years and had no upward mobility this is not somebody that's going to take a risk in in pushing something upstream so i'm probably going to try to avoid them but if every year you can tell they've been moving up adding a certification getting a new job something something like that at least showing progression those are the people it's like all right let me work here now the lower i get on the totem pole the more personal i get with my approach so for instance you know i'll ask people stuff like you know hey how do i make you look good right especially if i know they're on their way up and there's somebody that i can work with like i like i use that question to get into salesforce as a matter of fact um doug land is my boy um he used to work over at salesforce then was at box and now is running a emergence capital but um he was up on stage at dreamforce too he um that's how i got to him we sent an email to to the frank and george who are the cmo and vp of sales and it got all the way down to doug to do the evaluation and i knew doug wasn't gonna um you know i knew doug couldn't say yes in the sense that he wasn't the decision maker but he could absolutely say no so when i got to him when i looked at his profile he was at google he was at oracle he was at salesforce and every single role he had moved up and so when i got to him i said hey how do i make you look good and it kind of it shifted the dynamic from a vendor relationship to he saw me as somebody that could help him uh we could help each other right and so but when it comes down to really getting up to you know you got to be careful with your question here bobby about champion right i have a very specific definition of champion there's got to be too clear because there's there's fans coaches and champions fans are people that are usually and you know end users who love our stuff but have zero bearing on the decision coaches are people who tell us what we need to know who we need to talk to that type of stuff but the problem with coaches is you hear stuff from them like hey you didn't hear from me but this is what's going on and then champions champions for me have two very specific characteristics one is they can steal budget they can steal but they don't have to be the the decision maker or the person with the budget but they can steal it all right and the other is they agree to be your champion you actually have the conversation with them right and for me vps of sales it's actually pretty easy to have that conversation i can straight up say hey you're gonna be my champion on this one and they're gonna know what that means um yeah most other industries or people it's a little awkward to ask i did that to an hr person once i was like you'll be my champion on this and she was like what the hell are you asking me about and i was like all right i'm sorry but but you can ask in other ways right and this goes back to for instance um you know i'll do a session here on negotiations and gives and gets and negotiations so here's a you know give and get right somebody says hey john can i get that discount or can i get a can i get a few points shaved off here before i bring this upstream say sure you know what i'm gonna have to go fight for you internally on that discount on my end let me ask you if i fight for you internally on my end can it and i get to that discount will you be my champ will you fight for me internally on your end when it comes time to make this decision that's effectively saying will you be my champion without saying will you be my champion because there's really only two responses to that question one is absolutely john i want to we got to make this happen the other is anything other than that right because if you hesitate when i ask you you're going to be my champion in whatever way i want to ask that i'm not where i know where i need to be so i got some more work to do and so going back to your question here bobby like again be very careful about um how you determine who a champion is right usually at the lowest level they just can't because they're not involved in the decision if they are great and it also depends on i guess what you're selling but the key to to moving this upstream is asking them how they're going to present this you know what are some of the metrics they're going to use to justify this uh what are some of the roadblocks that they would see in in order to get there how many times have they made this type of decision in the past and how's it gone which ones have gone well and which ones haven't so these are all the things so i can coach them through how to present my solution to the ultimate decision maker again obviously i want to see if i can get my access access to them not to go over their head and have them not be part of this but to have them be there with me and that's why ultimately my favorite way of going over somebody's head without pissing them off is to ask them questions that they don't know the answers to and i don't mean this from an insult like i don't want to insult you but i want to make sure i realize in my career that if i can't tie to one or two of the top priorities of the organization if i can't tie my solution to that the likelihood of me selling anything significant is not high and so that's why i dig for those and a lot of times people way below the power line really have no insight into those or how what we're talking about aligns with that and so i'll ask them questions about hey when your ceo stood up in the beginning of the year you know what do they say their top two or three initiatives were and how are what we talking about here how does this align with those and what are some of the metrics you're going to use to measure the success of this right again a lot of people below the power line don't really have insights there and when they give me either vague insights or i don't know that's when i say look it's all right that you don't know that but i need to know because i want to make sure that what we're developing here is going to hit that mark because you and i we could be in violent agreement right now about about the solution and how much it makes sense for us to bring in but if we you know as we bubble this upstream to go look for budget for this if it's not crystal clear how it aligns an executive is just going to smack us and we are going to waste a lot of time together here right it's not just me it's it's us i don't want to waste our time here so could you help broker that conversation again i want you to be on this call but if you show them the types of questions that you want to ask those executives you might get a better chance because it might make them look good that they're bringing some legit sales rep who knows what the hell they're talking about to the table all right so try to ask them questions that they don't know if not you know try to get access to those people by saying hey you know so be more assumptive sometimes like hey so when does sarah need to be involved in this and you know when do you want to present when do you when do when should we present to sarah that type of stuff use like inclusive language there um and then if they flake on you just do everything you can to coach them to how to present this and maybe even put the presentation together for them all right hopefully that helps all right lily what's up uh what if results are tracking less favorable with a new client uh than a case study that uh with a case study that helped close their business what sales role is setting realistic expectations either given specific or unknown what sales role setting really looks that's a good question lily you know i think the case study stuff is it is a blessing and a curse right because you could set that kit you could set the motion uh in play for a case study and all of a sudden it doesn't turn out the way you want it to um so you know i think for me what i do is i try to find the metrics that i want to show um that i know i can hit a home run on and i try to introduce those early as far as my qualification into the client from a sales standpoint so this goes to your part of sales expectations here you know for me for instance like a couple of things i ask for is you know what's your average deal size what's your you know current conversion ratios and those type of things and i can i guess those because they're kind of obvious questions to ask to a vp of sales for what i sell i do sales training and then what i do is i use those later on to help from a negotiation standpoint because when somebody starts asking me john how much does this cost and i tell them and they're like whoa holy crap and then i can say well okay you know you said your conversion ratios are x and your average deal size is y you know if i got you one extra deal this year would not pretty much pay for the training so it helps me from a negotiation but it also sets the stage for that case study so later on like if i have to give a discount for instance i can say okay you know what happy to share with you that discount um let me ask you will you be a case study for us if i can give you that discount and it's like all right cool and then what happens there that's a formal process where i hand it over to marketing and say okay here's the metrics we're looking to impact here's how it's going to work you have to have a hand-holding approach to those ones right because if you don't you're leaving it up to the client and to to hopefully you know manage this appropriately but everybody knows that they don't internally they need help so with those clients specifically those logo clients i would actually sit down and think through like i'm trying to do this for myself i i need to get a lot more prescriptive for for my clients on what to do after the training right and be like okay here's you know day one you're going to be doing this day two weeks in this is going to happen this is what's going to happen and this was and here's how you're going to integrate it and here's how you're going to track it because without that prescriptive approach to how you leverage your services it's going to be hard to to um have them come back with anything substantial and there's a strong likelihood that they're not going to do it the right way and it's it's actually they're not going to get the highest value out of your solution so this is why you see so many customer success teams coming out these days this is why you see you know such a focus on that and and onboarding and implementation because without the right onboarding and implementation you're kind of leaving it up to them and hoping for the best and i don't again hope's not a strategy right so so again go back and you know understand the qualification criteria early leverage that to negotiate towards the end and then use that as a baseline for the metrics moving forward for that case study but you know make sure you walk them through it make sure you hand hold them through it and i would use i would integrate my sales marketing and customer success teams to make sure that that goes as well as possible so that if it's not going as well you can start to do something about it in the middle of it as opposed to calling them up to six months later and say so how's everything going and they're like look this sucks we want to cancel the contract so hopefully that helps um looks like we're a little bit out of time here it's about one o'clock i gotta go do this conference insert in front of uh probably have four or five hundred people so it should be fun um but anyways hope you got some value out of this if you did do me a favor help sharing this out uh tell your friends facebook live i'm trying to add as much value as i possibly can to my clients and everybody else um also you can follow me on snapchat john m as michael barrows answer any questions where i'll be flowing throughout the day uh hit me up on email john at j barrows.com and also twitter john m barrows as well all right all right buddy make it a great week make it happen you you you you you you you you you you