“Provide value to the client as quickly as possible” – Dalai Cote in today’s Tip 465
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today over on the Sales Success Stories podcast I just released my latest interview episode with Dalai Cote. He’s got such a great story of going from being a struggling seller to a top-performing sales professional. Here’s a short excerpt from that interview.
Dalai Cote: Dalai Cote: One of them is leading with value in every interaction, right? So early on in any client engagement, my number one goal is to provide value to the client as quickly as possible, and this helps me build credibility and rapport because you’re putting the client at ease, right? You’re signaling right off the bat that this session’s going to be useful. And I think Scott, buyers today are so used to be putting into a seller centric sales process, right? Buyers are conditioned to be skeptical of salespeople, so you need to pattern break right off the bat, disrupt that expectation. What I’ve found is that you know, once you establish value, buyers are going to be a lot more likely to open up to you about their challenges and the impact that it’s actually having on their business. Their guard’s going to come down a bit and they’re going to think like, “Hey look, this guy actually might be able to help me. I’m going to give him a chance. I’m going to listen.”
Scott Ingram: Now, how specifically are you doing that? What is that pattern interrupt?
Dalai Cote: So one thing that I don’t ever do on calls, first calls, discovery calls, demos, whatever it may be, is start off by being focused on myself, right? Asking a ton of questions about, you know, my discovery questions, the things that I want to learn from them. I’ll ask a couple, ask a couple of really pointed questions that, you know, I need to know to be able to deliver value, but what I want to do as quickly as possible is start delivering some value. And don’t get me wrong, right? Like we’re certainly going to focus on discovery, but I think of discovery as being a process that’s going to happen throughout the entire call, throughout the entire engagement as opposed to something that’s going to happen right off the bat upfront. And in that same vein, I’m also never going to start with a slide deck that’s not necessary. And I think a lot of organizations, and it’s something that I’ve seen in a lot of demos that I’ve listened in on his index to become customary, right? They’re a part of the process. But unless what you’re doing is really disruptive or it’s something that you know, requires a deck to help explain it. I don’t know if it’s necessary. I think let’s get into value. Let’s start showing what we want to show. Certainly not going to spend any time talking about, you know, how great my founding team is and you know, all the millions of investments that I have, on the millions of dollars in funding, I want to showcase. These are the things that I know that we can help with. I want to get to that as quickly as I can to show the buyers that, “Hey, if you’re gonna invest some time with me, it’s going to be really useful.”
Scott Ingram: Yeah. So give it a real example, cause I think there’s all of this talk about, “Hey, we should be delivering value.” What does that actually mean in this context?
Dalai Cote: So usually for me, I want to understand like right off the bat is what is the reason that we’re having this call, right? It’s, it’s the why now, what actually compelled them to take that call once I have a decent understanding of that, I mean that usually bleeds into pain. I want to get a sense of like what are the specific challenges that we can help with and I don’t want to start talking right away. Okay. It sounds like this isn’t a challenge, Scott. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to talk to them really quickly about all the different ways that we can help that are coming to mind and all of the things that I can potentially show them. Hitting on that pain, right? Hitting on that pain point, but also aligning it to other things that I know about their company, about their industry, talking about other companies that we’ve helped and other clients that we’ve helped in the same situation. Really high-level stuff, but right off the bat, right? Getting them excited about, “Ooh, there’s value here. There’s things, there’s really good nuggets.” And it’s actually really similar Scott, to what you do on this podcast, right? You start with a quick overview. These are a couple of core things, and then over time you build up into them, but your listeners right off the bat, are going to decide, right? They’re starting their commute. Do I want to invest time into this podcast? And that gives them a really easy way to go, “Okay, yeah, this is valuable. This is relevant to me. I want to spend time here.”
Scott Ingram: Well, do you want to invest time into this podcast? As always we’ll have links where you can connect with Dal and of course to the full 92nd episode on the Sales Success Stories podcast where we go much much deeper into this stuff. All of that is at DailySales.Tips/465
Once you’ve checked that out, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!