[00:00:00] Darryl Praill: My name is Darryl Praill. I'm your host and you, my friend, well, you and I we're gonna go on a journey every single week, talking to the industry's most accomplished sales legends, as they share with us, their tips, their tricks, their techniques, and their tactics to becomes sales rockstars. You simply need to do what they're doing and you will achieve similar nirvana. If you like to laugh, you like to be entertained, if you'd like to go off on tangents and tell stories, you're going to love what you're going to hear next. Sit back, relax, it's going to get real.

I'm back. I know, I know. You're like, didn't I just talk to you Praill? Yes, you did. Because you're a loyal listener. And if this is your first time listening, boy, brothers and sisters, have I gotta guess for you today? This is a repeat. Repeat speaker, whenever I bring in somebody back more than once it's because they're good or they're paying me.

No, just kidding. Ashley. Nobody pays me. Nobody. I should start monetizing this thing and get people to pay me to peer on the show. What do you think? That's another revenue stream. If I was a true creator, I'd be doing that influencer marketing. I could leave my day job. I can maybe do trade you know, do some day stock trading, ah, future possibilities.

Ah, I'm rambling. I wanna share a story. I always think to share stories, you know, me here's what's going on in my life these days. So funny story. Well, it's not so funny for me, but you might find it entertaining is my wife and I, we we're campers or some of you may refer to us as glamors, because we're not like, you know, backpack going to the Hills and roughing it.

We're more like, let me tow my trailer or my UK friends, my Cara. That's got the microwave, it's got the shower, it's got the island, it's got the kitchen, you know, it's got the fireplace. We're, we're really roughing it. We're clampers. And when the kids hit high school and they got jobs and they got into relationships and they had zero ability to to schedule themselves to save their lives.

We decided that we would stop going out to different places and locals every weekend and we would become seasonal campers. So we found a campground and. We within a year, cuz even the campgrounds, the best sites you have to get on a wait list. And we just happened to turn it when there was an ownership change and he was cleaning house and we managed it within a year.

We had a waterfront spot and we've had that spot for 10 or 11 years. And it's nice. I got a dock, I got a little boat, I got a beautiful 40 foot trailer up there. That's perfect for my wife and I, and it's a little piece of heaven that we get away to on the weekends, zero reception on the internet. So we're truly off.

So why does that matter? Well, why it matters is this, the campground changed hands late last year. So now we have the owners and here's where I'm going. I can, my, my camper it's on wheels. I can literally go anywhere. I want to with this camper. So if I'm not happy with this campground or the ownership, I can go to the next campground.

And what's happened in our current case is our current owners have come in and they want to be a quote unquote resort. They're heavily capitalized. They're buying up campground stuff, right. And center. And they literally doubled our fees overnight. And then. We all signed our fees in the new contracts we bitched, we moaned.

And then four days before we were allowed in entrance into the campground at the start of the season, they came back to us for thousands of dollars more. And since then their communication has, so there's been bitching and moaning. And the campground today is literally 35% empty. Not making money at all.

Cuz people have all bailed on them. So what does this say? This says for me, if I'm a vendor or a solution provider, like whom you work for, and I have this reputation, the chances of me getting new business is small. It's amazing. You know, the campground manager says, yeah, I showed 20 sites on the weekend.

I said, how many sites did you actually fill? Really why did 19 not do it? Oh, they saw the reputation. They saw the reviews online. They didn't like the rates, but yeah, they've all, they're all aware of the reputation. So our reputation precedes us that makes me as a sales rep or the partner manager, having a very difficult time to close new business and make that campground profitable.

So what do I do? I look at my options. Where else can I go to get this a, a better campground experience? And of course, what do I do? I do a couple things. I go to Google. I look at the reviews, the most recent reviews I go to Facebook and all the camping groups. I look at the reviews. I go to my little communities and I talk to people and then I ask questions and we say, Hey, you're at that campground.

I'm thinking of that campground. What's it like? And we have those conversations. All of this is taking place. And the campgrounds that I'm evaluating are oblivious. They don't know. They don't know. They make it my business. They may not. All of everything I've talked about is got one thing in common trust.

In the, in their former example, my new owner owners have lost my trust. I just don't trust them. I don't wanna give 'em business. I resent them. And I'm gonna tell everybody in the world about them, how they suck, including you on this podcast. I don't trust them. And there's a consequence to them losing my trust after beating there for 10 years.

And the next place me to look at other people. Now I'm bitter. Now I'm scared. So what am I looking at trust? Trust is instrumental. And there's one thing I heard a very wise fellow say to me, once he said, Darryl, what you need to know. Is that buyers don't trust you.

Sponsor: Are you in sales, but you're not using a sales engagement tool? Then you're probably losing out on revenue because you are not engaging with prospects at the right time, with the right cadence, and with enough persistency. You need VanillaSoft. Go to vanillasoft.com.

Darryl Praill: That fellow was Jason. He is with blissful prospecting. He's a rockstar. I love this guy. He's a messaging God.

And he is all over the social feeds. You should be following him on LinkedIn. It's simple, linkedin.com/slash Jason bay. But if you're, I'm sorry, Jason D bay. But if you actually know him and know him, well, we don't call him Jason Bay. No, NA. We call him JBay. Jason, my friend. Welcome to the show.

[00:06:29] Jason Bay: What's going on? I'm glad you made a distinction between glamping and camping. Yeah, I, I live in the Pacific Northwest here in Washington, so very important. Right. Glamping you own up to it. It's it's all good. You just gotta distinguish between roughing it out on the trail. In your little tent that fits in the backpack versus that nice camper. Like, it sounds like you have.

[00:06:48] Darryl Praill: I'm like an hour away from Algonquin park here in Canada, which is the biggest park. All of Canada and Canada is already the second largest country in the world. Algonquin park is bigger than many countries and it's the same thing for us to go and helicopter in or, or canoe inner Portage or what have you.

So I have to very much just make that same dis distinguish. Aspect wouldn't hear locally when I'm talking. So but yeah, we are we're slackers, Jason, we like our amenities. I like a hot shower. In fact, funny story we never had television. Of course we have no internet. And a couple years ago, my wife had always did at me.

We're never having satellite TV. We're camping, we're getting away. And I'm like, okay, dear. Then a couple years ago she started saying, well, you know, if it's rainy or something, maybe we should have satellite TV and I'm like, Uhhuh, but you told me no. Well, I know no, we're not gonna have it. Cuz we're camping.

And I'm like, okay. So then what do I do? We have satellite. I live in the country. We have satellite already. So I'm like, I can just pick up a sec, a second hand dish. I can bring one of my receivers with me and I can just go and do it. So I just did it. I bought a secondhand dish. I installed it. I pointed it, brought my receiver.

Boom, I've got it. And I expect it to get yelled at, by my wife. And and I said, what she got was a, a, a, I don't know, what do you call it? A very sheepish grin. I made her happy. So not only are we clamp, not only are we glamping, we're glamping with satellite television, how lame is that?

[00:08:09] Jason Bay: That just sounds too easy. You know.

[00:08:12] Darryl Praill: I know, I know, but let's go back to you. You, you, oh my God. And by the way, if you go to, you know, blissful, prospecting.com, I love Jason site. I help reps and sales teams turn complete strangers into paying customers yet. He's the same man that said to me, buyers don't trust you. Dear Mr. Sales rep buyers.

Don't trust you. Talk to me about that. Why do buyers not trust me? I'm a nice guy. Jason, what am I doing wrong? I'm a good guy. Mama raised me, right.

[00:08:44] Jason Bay: Well, I think that people are really quick to point out. You know, you've probably seen the stats. I mean, clear bit has the most recent stat, I think on cold emails, it's like less than one.

Chance of a reply positive or negative, right. Gongs had that stat for a while. 1.4, 8% chance of success on a cold call and people start with that. But I think what's more interesting is to look a layer deeper and like, let's look at why it's so ineffective. right in LinkedIn's state of sales. They just came out with 2022, I think earlier this week or something really recent, but in 2020, they poll, I think it was 10,000 sellers combination of sellers and buyers.

And they found that 32%, only 32% of buyers describe sales as a trustworth. profession. 32% of people that buy stuff at companies. Only a third of them. Describe it as a trustworthy profession. And on the flip side of that, you know, 88% of buyers say that they will only buy from a salesperson who they consider to be a trusted advisor.

So when you kind of start to unpack all of that, how we buy things, who we choose to buy from how our customers buy things. they just want to talk to a credible peer. That's the biggest thing. They want to talk to a credible peer and they're being so inundated with cold emails and cold calls and, you know, LinkedIn pitches and all this other stuff that they just don't want to interact with people that are clearly not someone that can add value to them.

And we can talk about that word value too. Cuz people throw that word around a lot as well. And I think they kind of overcomplicate it. . But when I do work with companies, some of the largest software and professional services companies out there, that's what I see missing. That's what I hear in those cold call recordings.

Sterile is skepticism. Oh, skepticism skepticism that first 30, 45 seconds. Just like you can tell the person's extremely skeptical of the other person. You know what I mean? Email is a tough channel because. You don't get the kind of feedback you do on a, on the phone, right on the phone. I can hear you. I can hear your tonality.

Hopefully I'm recording it. Email. If people don't like it, most people just don't respond to it, but that's how I always open up trainings. That's that's the biggest problem that we have is that people that have yet to hear from us are skeptical. They don't trust us. They don't trust you. So you're having to buy back that trust.

You're starting not from zero. You're starting from behind the finish line or the starting line, I guess it is.

[00:11:23] Darryl Praill: I always laugh because I there's a podcast I listen to and they've always had got a bizarre name of every single episode and what it is when you listen to the, the podcast, it's like a three hour podcast and there's a panel of four people.

And so it may take me several days to listen to it and they go off in tangents and I like it and they laugh. They make, they they're fun nail opine, which I quite like. And, but they'll always use some bizarre reference or pop culture stuff. And and that becomes the title of the episode, which is always ad hoc.

So soon as you say skepticism, I'm like, oh, oh, Jason bay, you know, the consummate skeptic, you know, skeptical. I don't know. I gotta come up with something, but I think I can work that into the title episode. Folks listening. There you go. That's where I get my inspiration from. Okay. So I love, you know, skepticism is not actually a word that I ever think I've ever heard.

Any other sales expert, influencer trainer, advisor leader ever use on me. And yet I think you nailed it. So my first question is why is nobody using that word? And how do we overcome it?

[00:12:23] Jason Bay: Yeah. Great question. So I think that there's the reason why I use the word skepticism is . I mean, think about what infomercials have done to everyone.

Think about what all of the crazy ads and stuff that we see has done to everyone. It's, it's all of these empty promises behind these products that don't deliver on their promises. And I think the. You know, that becoming a normal thing in the last 25 years that people have been starting to do is that there's review sites now, right?

Yeah. So it's not just the claim that that business is making about their product or service. And I see the same thing with cold emails and cold calls that I listen to. There's all of this. Like we work with all of these companies. , you know, I work with a company that helps with you know, they sell sales intelligence.

It's a, it's a conversational intelligence platform, excuse me. And, you know, Hey, we reduced the company's ramp time by 50%, even if you did that, it just sounds so outrageous. You know what I mean? And people are putting and peppering this stuff into their emails and people just get really desensitized to that stuff.

right. And it's like, well, that's, I'm a bit skeptical of that. You know what I mean? There's just all of these crazy, bold claims everywhere that people are just being peppered with. And now it's just rampant in B2B sales. I, I want to, right. That's what a lot of people talk about in marketing, right? Is that B2B marketing should be more like B2C marketing.

Well, what do they do in B2C marketing? They use these outrageous claims, you know, for stuff and people are going a little too overboard. So yeah, I think that this. Inherent need that people feel to put out these outrageous claims, even the ones that are true, that just look outrageous. It desensitizes people makes them more skeptical.

[00:14:05] Darryl Praill: So, true story to build on what Jason just said. This is honest to God. I had this conversation this 24 hours ago, my head of sales is saying to me, comes to me. I'm the marketing guy says Darryl, we need a piece of content. We need a piece of content. Then we're talking to the, you know, our user persona based what we call here, ULS our technician, the social media manager, that they can bring it to the executive to represent they can, they can, you know, effectively sponsor us.

They can, they can say you gotta talk to the, you know, we need this piece of stuff that the executive's gonna go. Damn, holy smokes. Get these people in here. I wanna talk to them. That's what we need. Can you help us with that? And I am like, why? And she's like, what do you mean why? I just told you why? And I'm like, no, no, hear me.

The question I'm asking, this is why here's the context behind the why I am your executive. I am the chief marketing officer that my social media manager is gonna bring that piece of content into me. If you're trying to sell. I said, this is what's gonna happen. You're bring me this piece of content and you're gonna be very proud of it.

And you're gonna say, I really think we should buy girl pulses, check this out. You're gonna love it. You're gonna see all the business reasons, the business case, why you should do it and the ROI you're gonna get it. And I said, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna say to them, I'm gonna say, I don't wanna see it.

And they're gonna go. Why not? I said, because it's a vendor published piece, it's only gonna show one point of view. It's inherently biased. It's skewed. It's self-serving I don't trust them. I'm completely skeptical. Of their motivation in writing this document. And she was like, and I love my, my head of sales Jenny, but she was like, really?

And I'm like, I'm telling you, I don't believe the vendors and I'm a vendor. So to your point, that's exactly how we feel. We're skeptical.

[00:15:53] Jason Bay: Yeah. And it's, I did this in action at the beginning of our conversation where I talked about LinkedIn state of sales. right. Gong clear bit. You take all of these places in to back up your claims, right?

So your second part of your question though, was how do we build, how do we reduce skepticism, AKA build trust. Yep. I think there's a couple principles that you want to take in consideration. So one is self-disclosure principle. So my therapist, Ben, right. I feel really close to Ben. but I don't know anything about him.

yep. I know nothing about this guy, except for the fact that he is a therapist. He lives in Portland. And I think he has a couple kids. I know he is married. He's got a kid or two yet. I feel really close to him. And in therapy, a lot of what they leverage is self-disclosure principle, which essentially states that the more someone talks about themselves and reveals things that they care.

The more they trust you. So how does that apply to prospecting? Well, let's take a cold call for example, you come from this land as well, Darryl. Yep. Right? I do. Yep. Think, think about how a typical cold call interaction goes. I listen to a lot of these recordings and it's something I do, especially before I start a training engagement is, Hey, let's just get a baseline of what your team's doing.

And it sounds a lot like this Darryl let's just role play. You be the prospect I'll okay, let's do it. I can do that. All right. And this is a client of mine that sells a customer experience solution. You're a, you're a VP of support. So you manage like a, a huge call center, a bunch of all that kind of stuff.

Okay. Ring, ring. Hello, Darryl speaking. Hey, Dar Jason with XYZ company. Look I'd love to set aside some time with you 30 minutes. If you got it later tomorrow or the next day, and talk to you about how we're helping some companies like B and C with their customer experience and our on demand platform and all the analytics and all that kind of stuff that we can get for you.

What's your schedule looking like tomorrow?

[00:17:56] Darryl Praill: Jason,

I appreciate it, but my schedule's crazy. And and, and candidly, we're fine for now. We don't have any budget. We don't have any initiatives. Maybe reach back out to me in six months from now maybe a couple quarters and that might change, but I just, I have no time right now.

[00:18:10] Jason Bay: That's what it would sound like if the prospect's really nice.

[00:18:14] Darryl Praill: Yes, yes. Cuz I asked you what I want for those listening. I I, because it's Jason and he, my guess I, listen, I let I'm finished. I would have cut 'em off. Yeah. I would have cut 'em off and say Fu stop there. Jason don't wanna waste your time. We're just not looking right now.

I appreciate it. Circle back. Yeah, you didn't, that's what jerk to me. Yeah. I I'd actually let you finish. Yeah.

[00:18:37] Jason Bay: So that, I know that might sound crazy to some people listening to this, but that is not an exaggeration from what 99% of reps will be. Whether they're selling B2C, B2B, whatever it might be. I get it all the time.

It's all about me. I got you on the phone. Oh shit. You know, like awesome. I'm gonna pitch you, you know? Yep. This is the one call out of a hundred. That's picked up.

[00:18:59] Darryl Praill: I love that you said it's all about me, cuz I get that. Whether it's a LinkedIn request or you know, as soon as we connect, boom, I get the pitch and it's all about you.

My company does this. Okay. I don't give a shit. You know, it's all about you. Can I have 10 minutes in your counter tomorrow? Do you realize you're calling into an executive? No executive who's doing his job, right. Or her job right. Has 10 minutes tomorrow or the next day, or, you know, if anything you should be looking at next week or two weeks or three weeks from now, total sidebar.

So what you're doing though, is you're conveying that you don't know me. You do not know me when you ask for that, but sidebar, go ahead.

[00:19:32] Jason Bay: Yes. So self disclosure principle. What I want to do in that first 30 to 45 seconds, that's really crucial is I want to not talk less than you. And as a percentage of talk time, that's not really what it's about.

Talk time is just the leading indicator. So if I looked at a cold call recording and I saw a rep talk to 80% of the time, that would be a way that I might look at something that might be going wrong. The actual percentage of talk time is not the important. it's the amount of time I spend talking about you.

That is the important part. So even if it's 60, 40, me, you, or 70 30, even if I'm talking more about you and stuff that you care about, that's what it's all about. That's gonna make you talk more about what's important to you. Usually if you pull it off correctly. So what we do in our cold call is instead of having an elevator pitch, I'm gonna replace that with what I call a priority.

So a priority drop is out of all the sales conversations I have with people like Darryl, this VP of support, what are the top two things that they tend to care about most that are most top of mind for them. And how could I find some sort of trigger or something based on my research that indicates that they might care about that.

Okay. So I'll kind of reverse engineer and we'll, we'll redo the role play here in a second. So when I reverse engineer this. what I know about a VP of support is they care about two things. One in a call center, it's all about getting fewer people to call into the call center. ironically . So they call that reducing the cost to serve specifically.

I want to get more customers to find that are own answers and selfer so I can reduce the cost to serve. And then two right now a really big one is around agent experience. So how could we reduce attrition? Give people better tools, all that kind of. Okay. Let's do another role play Darryl I'll let's do it.

I can let you know how that, you know, kind of sounds. There's a couple other stuff I'm gonna add to this, but I can, we can unpack it after I do it. Just ring, ring, ring.

[00:21:37] Darryl Praill: Hello, Darryl speaking.

[00:21:38] Jason Bay: Darryl it's Jason. I know I probably catch you in the middle of something, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and I let you know if you wanna keep chatting or not?

[00:21:44] Darryl Praill: Sure, but just a minute, I'm just candidly.

[00:21:48] Jason Bay: Appreciate it I'll make it quick. Darryl real quick. One of the things I I noticed is that you guys are hiring a lot of call center agents right now. And specifically in one of your quarterly reports, you mentioned a focus around reducing cost to serve. Does that at all, like ring a bell is?

[00:22:05] Darryl Praill: Yeah. I'm getting hammered by it as you might imagine from my CEO and my CFO.

[00:22:10] Jason Bay: Yeah, totally understandable. And the reason I was giving you a call Darryl is. Typically when I talk to VPs of support, I either hear a focus around that. So getting customers to self-serve more of that sort of thing, or. Kind of the opposite of that. I hear more of a focus around you know, agent experience.

So how can we provide them with better tools to do their job better so that we're reducing attrition are either of those two things, perhaps something that's a priority for you right now, or way off?

[00:22:33] Darryl Praill: No, they're both priority. They put my OKRs amongst a few of the things. But I am tight on time.

So if you don't mind me, you know, let's obviously I'm gonna guess you can help me out, hit me up with your best pitch and if you can. Hit hit the right hot button. We'll talk some more.

[00:22:47] Jason Bay: Absolutely. Well, the reason I was giving you a call as a telco is we're working with ABC customer. And one of the things that they noticed with reducing the cost to serve is that the way they would typically go about doing that is, you know, creating FAQ pages.

Like I noticed that you have a lot of, and kind of pushing people into digital channels. One thing that they found though, is. When they were able to get more insight into what people were actually doing, we found that that was actually driving up call center volume. People were calling more cuz they couldn't find their answers and I'd love to share some insights into what they did to sort of fix that problem in hopes that it might be helpful for you.

Does that sound like something that might be worth maybe 15, 20 minutes of time in a, in a week or two?

[00:23:27] Darryl Praill: I mean, we are all over FAQs. It's funny you say that because it's pissing me off. If you've got something to help me out with that, you got my attention and I will make time for that. It might be a bit, it might be a week or 10 days.

And if it's okay, I like to bring one of my people in with me. Cool.

[00:23:40] Jason Bay: And then we'll schedule the call and all that stuff from there and all of sudden. So if we really rewind. I used a permission based opener and that was one of the first things I did. Those are sort of optional. I find it to be pretty effective at the beginning.

I could have even put and packed some relevance into that open. Hey Darryl, this is Jason was reaching out because I noticed you guys are hiring a bunch of call center agents and XYZ is going on. Oh, by the way, you got a minute for me to tell you the reason for my call. And you can let me know if you wanna keep chatting.

Like I could put that into the front of the call if I wanted to, but I'm gaining permission. Yep. Again, it's an, it's an optional thing that I find works really effectively because Darryl didn't pick up the phone because he thought it was a cold caller trying to sell him. You probably thought it was someone else, dude.

Okay. It's a pretty safe assumption that 81 that picks up a cold call, especially an executive. Didn't do it on purpose. Okay. So let's acknowledge that. The next thing that I did is I immediately demonstrated that I did my research, which is so easy to do. In most cases, I need to show him right away that I'm reaching out to him on purpose.

And then that priority drop. All I did was mention two things. sometimes there's three, depending on who it is that you're reaching out to the, that part is like the, the relevance part of the message that is me adding relevance to people that I see, like him VPs of, of support in telco, in their industry.

I know that 80, 90% of the people that are in hips is position are focused on those two things. And then I'm adding a little bit of customization on top of that, showing him that I did some research on. And your company, I dunno where you wanna go from there, but those pieces right there, that's usually enough to get people to talk about themselves.

I'll stop there. There's a second part to that. When you asked me what we do, there's a really good way to answer that question. And there's a really shitty way. I don't know if we can, we use profanity in your podcast and really kind of

[00:25:34] Darryl Praill: Used profanity, stupid ass profanity. So there's a couple things I wanna talk about here.

[00:25:39] Jason Bay: Yeah.

[00:25:40] Darryl Praill: So for those listening, what you heard Jason do is. What I would almost contend is a much more polished version of ring ring. Hello? Hi, this is a sales call. Can I have 30 seconds? I mean, it's permission based. I'm asking I'm full disclosure. This is what it is. I'm asking for it. Now, Jason, as you listened to it, he was far more eloquent and approachable.

I didn't feel like I had a boiler room sales rep asking for 30 seconds. I felt like I had an actual, you know, his tonality, his delivery, his pacing was much more off dis disarming. That's sort what we're looking for. Second thing you need to understand. There's something else that is taking place here that Jason didn't mention to you is that when he asked my permission and I give it to him, I as the, the person on the other end of the call is I, I feel in control because I gave him permission.

I could have said, no, I had the choice. So, but he dis discerned me and he would, because he was self disclosing and therefore I gave him control. Therefore, this is my choice to listen to him now. So, this is awesome. And then going back to your second point where I started asking questions that's because he dinged something in the back of my head where I'm like, okay, you know, first, when he, when he first started talking about some of his stats, I'm like, yeah, you know, it's interesting, but I mean, it's in the script, but then when he started talking about the FAQs and how that actually drove it up, I'm like son of a bitch.

That could be my problem. I now need Jason. So he went from, he, he, he built trust that fast because he was able to educate me and he showed me that he knows me. And now I go from being, you know, in control to then I ironically I've lost control. Cause I, now I do wanna learn more. So because it's, it's, it's, it's in my best interest.

And I, I bring it back to if for those who listen there regularly, you would've heard a few episodes ago. We talked with Tebow at. He talks about understanding how to connect the dots, which is what Jason just talked about here. And what he said was once you know, your idea of customer profile and the persona, he says, you know, what is the one metric that matters to your target persona, which is what Jason would, he said one or two, what is the one metric that matters to your persona?

So what is the goal related to that metric? All right. What is the initiative required to achieve that goal? So right now, Jason and I are kind of at the metric and the goal, probably we haven't got this far, but this is what you need to know. So once you know, the initiative required to achieve that goal, then he goes, what are the problems related to that initiative?

And then what are the symptoms related to the problems? And you're gonna use those symptoms. So what, Jason start to do a little bit in the message. And if you look at what Jason's really good at amongst many things, we haven't talked about this. He has, when he talks about the outbound equation, which I don't wanna give it away, but his point is outbound equation is your volume times your quality.

And he'll say quality is a combination of message fit and delivery message, message, and delivery to those key components were what he just did. He overcame my skepticism. So. That's me as the buyer. I'm just giving you my psychological, emotional, you know, executive reaction to his approach and how I trust this guy.

I already trust this guy a like his therapist. I don't really know him. So there we go. You wanna do the second part? Yes.

[00:28:58] Jason Bay: So you. Yeah. I'll I don't even have anything else to add to that. Dar so the second part you asked me will give me your best pitch. Yeah. Prospects will say that a lot or it'll be a combination of, so what do you guys do?

Yep. Now the biggest mistake you can do in answering that question is to not answer it using what I refer to as the customer voice. I've heard a lot of organizations refer to customer voice. So anytime I wanna talk about my solution, I'm gonna talk through the lens of how a customer would talk about.

So a really good question to do. I know this is for sales reps, this podcast. So maybe you do it with your team or pick someone else is in trainings. What I'll do is I'll say, Hey Darryl, what do you guys do? And they'll describe it in one way. And usually if it's a customer experience platform like this, it'll be like, yeah, we we get you the fastest customer insight.

So you can put it into action and do all this other stuff. Right. I was like, okay, now your best. Think of that person, you got it. How would they describe what you do to one of their peers or it's very different. It's very, very different. The way that they would describe it. And that's what I did through answering that question is I talked, I, I answered your question through a customer story.

Well, Hey, another similar telco, like Comcast, they went about this priority or this problem in this way. And here's what they ran into. and here's how we help them. It's really simple. You need to have these like three to five sentence customer stories, two or three of them on hand at all times commit them to memory, but I'm gonna answer, I'm gonna talk about what we do through the lens of a customer.

I'm not gonna say we do this. We do that. I'm gonna talk and demonstrates social proof and credibility through doing that. That's the other kind of principle that you need to to think about? There's really a couple social proof is. But bringing up a, a company or an individual that's in a very similar situation to the prospect.

And then there's also likeness not being like a bull likeness as in, Hey, I'm one of you. I understand your world. I am using your language. It's such a key, like reducing cost to serve self-serve. Those are words and phrases. These prospects. . So I go from being a salesperson to a peer, a consultant, even trusted advisor that that phrase gets thrown around a lot, but it's really kind of simple.

I need to know what's going on in your world and I need to use that language and I need to make the focal point of the conversation you and not me. And the way that I teach this, it's crazy to people that have never done it before. . I was like, what I'm gonna teach you in your cold calls is how to land a meeting without pitching your solution.

And people were like, oh, you can't not pitch your, I was like, you don't have to pitch it. You're just gonna talk about how a customer is using your solution. Like to fix a problem and to get an outcome. That's all the executive cares about. They don't give a shit about what dashboards your stuff comes with.

Okay. They're not even gonna be looking at it. They're probably not even gonna open the tool. you know what I mean? Nope. They care about the outcome and that's the language. You know, skip Miller wrote a book called selling above and below the line that should be required reading for any sales professional.

And the concept's really simple people below the power line. It's not like they don't influence the decision, but a, a director and below they're very tactical day to day, fixed my pain, make my job easier, make me more productive, make my team happier and above the line VPC level. It's all about business.

how is this gonna help us hit our quarterly targets, our yearly targets? How is this going to help us grow top line revenue, increase our profit margins, reduce risk, or create some sort of efficiency across the org that I can measure. That's what they care about. So when you talk about features and benefits, you're not talking in the language that's, that's violating the likeness principle, right?

I'm not like a, an executive I'm. If I'm talking about stuff that they don't care. they talk about outcomes. That's the thing I'm always pushing people to, and, and emails I'm like this, like getting insight into this thing through this dashboard, like, what is the outcome of that? What does that help me do?

Oh, it reduces cost to serve. That's the thing that I care about.

[00:33:14] Darryl Praill: I've told my reps because obviously we're a social media management company, so therefore the head of marketing. Which is me, is one of my tiger personas. And I say to them, I said, why are you pitching features and functions guys come. I said, this is what you should be doing.

And so where I'm going with this is I want you to understand that Jason was talking about pain points and metrics, you know, measuring things and goals. Right. I said, talk to me and ask me, what is my cost per lead. Per by channel, what is my customer acquisition cost? What are some my lifetime value?

Ask me these of, of, of a typical client. Ask me these questions. What is the average selling price of my product? Am I happy with that? Do I wanna lower? Cost per lead per general, lower customer acquisition. I want lower churn. I want higher lifetime value. I wanna higher ASP, you know, what's your plan to do that?

How are you measuring that are events working for you? Is paper, click working for you? What's the ROI in your social media. And when you ask that question, I won't have an answer. So that's the pain point. That's what opens up the conversation. It's not talking about Instagram reels or now that I can go live with stories or anything else, that's irrelevant.

I don't give a shit about that. That's not my job. Exactly. As Jason just said, they'll probably never be opened the software. Jason nailed it, guys. This is a teaser, Jason, open up by saying the buyers don't trust. He then physically said the reason is, is cuz they're skeptical. He talks about his self disclosure principle.

He gave you permission based opener and he demonstrated with a real, real live role playing with me about, he was able to overcome my skepticism while I still felt in control. But because of his approach with permission based his permission based opener, he was able to establish trust and flip the tables so that now I need a him and want to learn more.

That's how it's done. It's not up about your feature and function. We're out of time. You like him. I told you're gonna like him. He's awesome. Blitz full prospecting.com is the site. Jason is pretty damn good at what he does, as he says on his LinkedIn profile. He helps you turn complete strangers as you just demonstrate it into paying customers.

So check him out, follow him. You love his content. Jason's very solid by messaging. So if you're having issues with your sequences, with your emails, how to engage. Check him out. He's also been known to get into a little bit of LinkedIn controversy, which I love about him, but we won't go down that road today.

So with that all said, Jason, my friend you've been in delight. Thank you so much.

[00:35:45] Jason Bay: Yeah. Thank you for having me on. And we have a podcast as well, blissful prospecting podcast. So wherever you're listening, click out of that flare, make sure to subscribe to our stuff as well. We talk about similar stuff.

And we both have a, a really big passion for helping reps have smarter conversations. So you don't get rejected, so much still make sure to check that out.

[00:36:02] Darryl Praill: This guy's everywhere folks and he's worth it. He's worth to listen. My name's Darryl another week in the books. That's what I, I, you know, talking hard anyway. We'll get there and we'll get even better. Maybe we'll open up our next podcast episode with some self disclosure. What do you think about that again? That was Jason. As we call him JBay. I'm Darryl. I'll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

This episode was digitally transcribed.