“But the net of all of this is we’re not thinking enough about what that buying experience feels like for our buyer” – Scott Ingram in today’s Tip 204
How is my prospect experiencing this process from me? Am I helping lead them through that process?
Join the conversation below and share your ideas!
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You are listening to the daily sales tips podcast and I’m your host Scott Ingram. Today I’m going to do something a little bit differently. Typically, I actually script out a good chunk of these tips and I kind of read that script and just try and make it sound like I’m not reading a script, but today is a little bit of a rant and we started this conversation on Friday a once a month we have an attendee, a networking call for the folks that have registered for the Sales Success Summit. We’ve had some great, great conversations. It’s just we’re trying to build relationships going into the summit since it’s still a couple of months away, put faces with names, try and add some value going into that event. We’ve had some really, really interesting conversations and one of the things that came up that I kind of prompted in Friday’s conversation was we are not considering the buyer’s experienced enough in the way that we’re selling. So just this last week, getting back from vacation, I bought a Tesla. I took delivery on the car the day that I got back from vacation. And with that, there were actually essentially three different purchasing components to that. Right. So there was buying the Tesla itself, which was much, much better than the traditional buy a car at a dealer experience where, I gotta go back and talk to my manager and this process takes three, four hours. It was all online. I went up to the domain in Austin to drive the car cause I hadn’t been in one and so great experience there, but they’re just there to kind of show it off. There’s, there’s no sales pressure. They’re just there to provide that service and give people the experience because they know, right. If you’re buying the car, you know everything you need to know, what does a salesperson at a car dealership, know these days that we haven’t already found out online. So I just needed to get in the car and validate that decision. And when I did it was kind of no brainer. And from there go online, go order it. You know there were very, very few moving parts. It was a very, very simple, straightforward process. So Tesla did a great job. The next piece was working out the financing for the car and so I went to a couple of different banks and you know to play the rate game a little bit and what it frustrated me through that process, the application process and getting the quotes and all of that, that was pretty straightforward, pretty easy. What I wasn’t it really excited about is I actually ended up spending the only real kind of work that I did on vacation. The only time I pulled out my laptop was to finish the basically closing the loan and getting the loan funded and Tesla page so that they would deliver the car and there were too many parts of that where I was doing the follow-up and I was managing the process, where I really felt like the bank that I took the loan from should have been doing that. They could’ve easily been more proactive about that process and made it so way more seamless for me to wear. I mean there at the end of the deal, the ordering document was a one-page document and we did it on DocuSign. So super easy. Once we got there, the steps in the middle could have used some work. And then the last experience I had was finding the electrician and getting the quotes for the installation of the charger in my garage. And that was fascinating because the front end of that process was great from both companies that they had a really easy online form. And I sent in pictures of what I was saying, I didn’t even talk to a salesperson. Right? So, that’s its own issue. We won’t go into that, but the response is what was broken at least for one of the companies. So the next morning I get both quotes within about an hour of each other. The first quote is the best quote, right? It’s a great rate, but it was completely generic. There was just nothing of substance in this email. And in fact, the email came from generic email addresses. Actually, it looked like it came out of QuickBooks, which was confusing. It didn’t come from an individual. It came from the company. There was no phone number, there was just the quote information. It was like, “Hey, just sign this and send it back and we’ll schedule your installation.” The next quote, response was almost twice as much, but it was laid out great, right? It was, here’s a couple of different options. We can do this. One of two different ways. Here’s quotes for both approaches. It came from a human, the human’s name was Scott. So he had a leg up and then the, his very next email, minutes later was, here’s why you ought to do business with us. Right? And it was just a great human articulation of this is, this is the type of company that we are, this is why we care about the stuff and this is why we do this type of work. And then I got a text from Scott and said: “Hey, I just emailed you all the stuff, you know, let me know how I can help.” So there wasn’t anything crazy that he did. And you know, I think they missed an opportunity because all I did is send them the previous quote and they matched it. He could have sold the, he certainly could’ve gotten a couple of hundred extra dollars out of their service because it was more valuable. So hopefully he’s not listening to this. Well, I already signed to the coast, so we’re good. But the net of all of this is we’re not thinking enough about what that buying experience feels like for our buyer. And I think obviously in B2B there’s a lot more complexity to this a lot of times. And where the conversation went as we talked through this as a group on Friday is sometimes when you sell something that doesn’t fit into a very natural box like that they’ve bought before, if it’s unique, then your process is even harder. Because a lot of times they don’t even know who they need to go talk to. Who do I actually sell this to? So my challenge for you here, and I guess the tip in all of this is we need to give some more thought to how is my prospect experiencing this process from me? Am I helping lead them through that process? And asking them the questions about the steps that they might have internally that they might not even be aware of or haven’t thought of yet, and making sure that you’re not asking them to now go sell your solution internally. You need to get into a position where you’re the one that gets to do that. So the help that they should be able to provide is, “Hey, help set up the meeting, but let me do the work.” You shouldn’t have to do this right. When, and that might come to finding the budget or getting through contracts or getting through the other procurement steps or whatever that is. But at any point, if there’s an opportunity for you to do the work and for you to be proactive and do the things that need to get done in that buying process, that are just things that they, they have to do internally, right? You, you can’t sign the contract for them. You can’t allocate the budget for them. Right. But really getting in and anything else where you can again, help lead through that process and take things off their plate and make that experience better. I think a couple of things happen. One, it’s a massive differentiator. It builds a ton of trust because the natural thinking there is okay if they’re this good on the front end in the sales process and the sales experience, they’ve got to be great on the delivery side of things and on the customer service and customer experience side once I become a client. And you become so much more referable, right. That experience is so much easier to say, “Hey, you ought to buy a Tesla.” Because this is the experience that you get to have, and it’s not like the regular crappy car buying experience that you normally have. It’s so much easier to refer that versus, well, you could talk to the sales guy. He helped me, but you know, it is what it is. That’s not the kind of referral that I want. Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind. I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend and I will see you tomorrow with another great sales tip.