“I love to be creative and try different things because that keeps me engaged and interested in what I do.” – Michael Harris in today’s Tip 682
How do you setting up conversations with your customer?
Join the conversation below and check out the full interview with Michael!
Michael Harris on LinkedIn
Michael Harris on Sales Success Stories Interview
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today there’s a new interview episode on my Sales Success Stories podcast available. This one features Michael Harris who went from being a sales trainer to the top enterprise sales rep at Epicor. Here’s a short excerpt from our conversation that I thought was particularly interesting and useful:
Michael Harris: I think it helps to be creative to try different things and things that you find of interest. I mean, before, when we spoke briefly before the podcast, you felt that there’s not necessarily one thing everyone does. It’s just people find out how to be themselves. And so I love to be creative and try different things because that keeps me engaged and interested in what I do.
So one of the things I did is I went out and interviewed a lot of customers and I spoke to them on Skype. And then I would record those calls. And then I would make short little minute and a half videos about why they bought Epicor. And I might break them up into three or four short little videos. And then I was able to use those in my sales cycle and bless Epicor that they allowed me to do that because you could see a big company saying, “Hey, you’re not allowed to do that. You can’t share that content” but they did. And I found that to be very, very effective.
And then the third, and I guess I already went over. This is you gotta be resilient and you don’t get pulled down into the end of the drama and you kinda stay with the pain and sit with it and then get to the truth.
Scott Ingram: We could probably talk for an hour about just these, but I want to come back to the specifics of the videos you were doing and how you were setting up those conversations. Right? Cause I think there’s so much power in, what we say is going to get taken with a grain of salt, right? Everybody knows what our position is and where we have a vested interest, but if you can get some peer to peer selling going on, if you can have customers advocating for your product, that kind of shifts the game, how did you set that up? I mean, go walk us through that.
Michael Harris: Sure. Well, I don’t think you show up with a video camera and lights because they’re immediately going to say, “Oh, I need to have permission to do this.” So often I call up and I say, you know, I’m new in the territory or, you know I know you through, so-and-so, I’d love to have a chat with you to find out why you bought Epicor. And I’d like to record this. I might share it with some customers, you know, yada, yada, yada, it’s not going to go up on YouTube or it’s not going to go on our website. You don’t need to worry about that. But I just like sharing these customer stories with other customers that I speak with. You try and make it sound as innocuous as possible. So it doesn’t have to go through their legal department and then you just have a conversation and you’re curious and you care. And so you want to hear their views, you know, why did buy Epicor? Why did you buy us versus someone else? And you just kind of follow your nose and see where it takes you. And then, you know what it’s like from doing these podcasts and then you’ll well not, you probably don’t do this, but you know, you leave 90% of what you discussed on the editing floor and you put something together.
Scott Ingram: For a link to my full interview with Michael Harris on the Sales Success Stories podcast, just click over to DailySales.Tips/682 for that link and to connect with Michael on LinkedIn.
Then, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!