“Every salesperson on the planet would make sure every interaction they had with a buyer, whether it’s a 1st meeting or the 100th, was compelling and relevant and highly personal” – Evan Kelsay in today’s Tip 244
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Seismic
Evan Kelsay on LinkedIn
Infinite Monkey Theorem
Forrester Report
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Evan Kelsay who is a Senior Director of Global Accounts at Seismic and a big part of the Sales Success community. Here he is with today’s tip:
Evan Kelsey: The camera opens on a student near the end of the semester. The student says “Excuse me, professor, did you have any thoughts on the exam paper I turned in last Friday?” The burly professor replies “Son, are you familiar with the Infinite Monkey Theorem?” Student shakes his head. “It’s a mathematical theory, my boy. That states that 10,000 monkeys hitting keys at random for an infinite amount of time would almost surely one day produce the complete works of William Shakespeare.” After a beat, the confused student says “But what about my paper?” The professor replies “Two monkeys, ten minutes.” If given enough time, every salesperson on the planet would make sure every interaction they had with a buyer, whether it’s a 1st meeting or the 100th, was compelling and relevant and highly personal, answering the holy sales trinity of Why. Why do anything? Why do it now? Why do it with you? Like some sort of Sales Jedi. Before speaking with any deal, influencers have consequences and an account we would have done all the things that make a first meeting truly transcendent. Delve deeply into the company’s published financial information. Pour over their investor day presentations in 10k’s, especially sections 1A and 7A for disclosures on market risk to understand the macro challenges that business leaders believe they’re facing and what they’re saying about how the company is addressing those macro challenges and many times micro-challenges. You interview every potential end-user of your solution to pull out what I like to call Golden Quotes of Sheer Pain Abject Horror, I love them. To show that influencer the extent of the problem and how much the house is on fire. You’d appeal to the person’s emotions first with every statement or question as the part of the brain, and this is important that makes decisions, cannot understand language. You’d adjust that language to match the person’s decision-making style. There’s four of them, Analytical, Conceptual, Directive or Behavioral. And you’d walk them through their own procurement process to lower the risk in their minds and the hurdles for the deal, accelerating the closing process and building credit. I could go on for days. However, like Jack Bauer in 24 or Tom Cruise in any movie this century. Us sellers don’t have that kind of time. Forrester and Seismic just came out with a fantastic study where they asked hundreds of leaders in sales enablement about the state of buyer expectations and what salespeople can do to meet or exceed them. The results were fascinating. Modern business buyers are beyond empowered. They are entitled based on their frictionless personalized experiences with consumer brands. Think Netflix or Amazon. They now demand unfettered access to your company’s Information and expect relevant and highly personalized pieces of content to find them in their decision making journey, not the other way around. With so much information directly available to prospects and customers. 88% of the studies respondents agreed that buyers expect more relevant and highly personalized information today than they did even five years ago and a further 85% agree that buyers are more likely to dismiss a seller if they don’t receive relevant and tailored information in the first interaction. I call this getting a B+ on the first test, which coincidentally was my average in college and probably the reason why it took me so long to get okay at sales. Despite understanding how important personalization is in prospect interactions. That’s a mouthful. It’s a major challenge for most selling organizations for most of my career until my current company, Seismic. Finding, building and personalizing pieces of content or collateral for my buyers, things like proposals and first meeting decks and customer business reviews and leave behind one sheeter and contracts was the number one non-selling time suck of my week. The bane of my existence. It just edged outputting just enough information into my CRM to keep my boss off my back. Usually, more than one full day of every week of mine was dedicated to it, which I was glad to see mirrored in the results of the study. As sellers, we have to recognize the age of buyer entitlement as the new normal and evolve or die. You want to differentiate. Invest in tools that take low value, low brain work off of your plate, get it out of there. Use AI intelligence tools like Nudge and People and Sales Navigator to understand not just what your accounts do but when they might be in the market to buy. Use outreach tools like Vidyard, Covideo, Outreach to find novel ways to deliver a value-based message to cut through the noise. Novelty is key. Use sales enablement automation tools like Seismic to make sure the right sales content is situationally aware enough to find you in your workflow, not the other way around and automatically assemble itself most or all the way to make sure everything that you show in send your buyer is personal to them and carve out time every day. This is really important for deep account research, especially into a company’s financials. To guarantee the story, your telling is highly personalized to the person you’re trying to tell it to and aligns with their executive leadership’s goals. In the age of buyer entitlement, the bar to demonstrate you’ve done your homework and know your buyers business is very high. However, exceeding that bar earns you the right to tell them about you, so that you can paint a picture for them about us.
Scott Ingram: For more about Evan Kelsay, including a link to the Forrester report that Evan mentioned in this tip, just click over to DailySales.Tips/244. Then be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!