Darrell Amy's Blog

A Better Alternative To the Buyer’s Journey?

First, the Buyer’s Journey is anything but linear. In most cases, it looks more like a cloud of dust than a straight line. Trying to determine where a buyer is in this process feels futile, yet sales and marketing teams try to plot this out. It’s no wonder that most Buyer’s Journey maps get created and then rarely used.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, buyers buy based on emotion more than fact. Harvard professor emeritus and author of How Customer’s Think, Gerald Zaltman, shares research that validates what I’ve learned in every sales training over the past three decades of my career: “Emotion is what really drives the purchasing behaviors, and also, decision making in general.” He found that 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. https://www.inc.com/logan-chierotti/harvard-professor-says-95-of-purchasing-decisions-are-subconscious.html

In his book, The Perfect Plan, Don Barden cites data that buyers only remember a tiny fraction of the knowledge you share with them. They all remember how you make them feel. In essence, the buying process should be designed less to make the buyer and expert in your area of speciality, and more to make them feel comfortable that you can help them achieve results.

On the other side of the buying process, we have this thing called Customer Experience. Once a new customer signs the order, the CX team kicks into action. Smart companies look at the experience across the customer lifecycle, strategically building emotions that sustain loyalty.

An entire genre of work around CX exists in the operations and customer success world by authors like Joseph Pine, James Gilmore, and Joey Coleman to name a few. Most of this research has yet to make its way into net-new sales and marketing.

Buyers buy based on emotion. They use facts to feel confident (emotion) and reduce fear (emotion) about their decision.

Based on this line of thinking, here are a few questions:

Since buyers buy off emotion, what if we took the lessons of Customer Experience and applied them to the Buyer’s Journey?
What if the buyer’s journey was as focused on how we made the members of the buying team feel rather than just trying to arm them with knowledge?
How could this transform marketing and sales?
How could marketing and sales cooperate to create a memorable and meaningful Buyer’s Experience?
What if we replaced the term Buyer’s Journey with Buyer’s Experience?

Originally published on Darrell Amy's LinkedIn.

The Number One Way Marketing Can Help Sales Win

Let me cut to the chase: the number one way marketing can help sales win is by interviewing clients and creating insightful case studies. 

In Elite Sales Strategies, Anthony Iannarino coaches reps on how to achieve the one-up position by bringing insights into the sales conversation that add value.

I am a firm believer that buyers don’t buy your products and services, they buy the outcomes your products and services enable. (In Revenue Growth Engine we take a deep dive into outcomes and how to create an outcomes inventory. Read more about How To Market and Sell What Your Buyers Are Actually Buying.)

How do you determine what outcomes buyers value? You ask.

Salespeople should be continually talking with their clients. Iannorino explains, “Every interaction with a stakeholder provides you with an opportunity to be tutored by experts in a specific industry.”

Marketing should also be talking regularly with clients. This can be done in the form of case study interviews.

Having done hundreds of case study interviews over the years I’ve discovered that clients are open to talking with marketing in ways that they might not talk with sales. As much as salespeople work to build relationships of trust with their clients, oftentimes clients are guarded in what they say to salespeople. These same clients may talk openly with marketing.

What is an Insightful Case Study?

An Insightful Case Study goes beyond the benefits of the product or service to explore the business outcomes that were enabled. 

The Insightful Case Study begins with the context of the business goals and challenges the client faced. Ideally, this connects with broader challenges faced in the client’s industry and the economy at large.

Next, the Insightful Case Study explores how the product and service is helping the client achieve their outcomes.

Finally, the Insightful Case Study shows how the outcomes were achieved. 

Benefits To Sales

Insightful case studies benefit sales in three ways:

1. Identify Relevant Insights

While most sales people use bland adjectives like productivity, scalability, or efficiency to describe their offer, sales professionals armed with Insightful Case Studies can bring specific insights into conversations with prospects and clients.

2. Bring Clarity

Stories make complex concepts easier to understand. When sales professionals can share stories from Insightful Case Studies they help make abstract concepts more concrete.

3. Bring Credibility

Salespeople and marketing teams make all kinds of claims. With trust at an all-time low (Check out the 2021 Trust-Building Challenge) sales professionals can add credibility to claims by referencing real-world examples from the client base.

Benefits To Marketing

All of the ingredients to successful marketing are found in talking with current clients. Every piece of marketing content becomes more powerful when marketing prioritizes Insightful Case Studies. These conversations give marketing the specific insights and exact words to use in web content, blog articles, lead magnets, social posts, and sales collateral. 

Get Started Today!

So, what are you waiting for? Set a goal (an aggressive goal, dare I say a quota) to complete a certain number of Insightful Case Studies each month. As you do this, share the insights with sales. Then use what you’ve learned to improve all of your marketing content.

 

Originally published on Darrell Amy's LinkedIn. 

How To Make Revenue Growth Predictable In Uncertain Times (Part 2)

Over the past few years, business leaders have become familiar with uncertainty. In the midst of pandemic pivots, supply-chain shifts, and hiring hassles, one thing has remained constant: the need for revenue.

Revenue is the lifeblood of business. We have proven our ability to solve all kinds of problems, but revenue problems are a massive change. Some of the biggest problems happen when uncertainty leads to unpredictable revenue. Thus, it is important to take smart actions to ensure revenue growth remains predictable, especially in uncertain times.

This is the second in a series of three articles offering strategies to make revenue growth predictable. Previously we explored the importance of Focusing Your Message. In this article, we will unpack the second strategy: aligning marketing, sales, and operations around your Client Experience.

(In this article, I will use the words client and customer interchangeably. Some industries have customers while others have clients. Personally, I like the word client, even in an industry that traditionally uses the word customer because the world client infers a relationship of trust.)

What Is Client Experience?

Client Experience is the sum total of the impressions and feelings your prospects and clients have as they interact with your company.

My first employer, Lanier Worldwide, had a great company tagline, Customer Vision. They defined it as follows: “We strive to see your business and your needs through your eyes.” This is the mindset of Client Experience.

Marketing, sales, and operations teams tend to look at things through their own lenses. Marketing sees audiences, funnels, and leads. Sales see activity, pipeline, and deals. Operations see processes, support desks, and NPS (Net Promoter Score) rankings. It’s no wonder that these teams have trouble communicating, even in small companies that aren’t supposed to have silos.

A Client Experience perspective allows marketing, sales, and operations to look through the same lens. Seeing through the eyes of the customer (and prospective customer) they are able to understand what it might be like to interact with the company.

From this perspective, each team can then begin to think how they can enhance the entire experience. From there, playbooks can be created that orchestrate an amazing experience as marketing, sales, and operations work together to serve prospects and clients.

How Does Client Experience Help Make Revenue Predictable?

Improving Customer Experience leads to more predictable revenue in the following ways.

1. Maximize Cross-Sell Revenue

There are only two ways to grow revenue: grow net-new business by adding new customers or cross-sell more to your existing customers. For most companies, the low-hanging fruit is in the cross-sell revenue.

Sadly, most companies fail to maximize their cross-sell revenue. Sales and marketing are focused on driving net-new. Once a customer comes on board they get handed off to operations or customer success. At that point, the marketing and selling stops. Marketing and sales move on to the next deal. Meanwhile, your base of clients desires multiple outcomes that your company could satisfy—if only they knew.

Looking at your Customer Experience shines a bright light on the areas where you could incorporate cross-sell strategies. Companies that get smart and consistent about cross-sell build processes and playbooks to ensure they maximize their revenue-per-client.

2. Increase Client Retention

Employee turnover is a huge challenge. Client turnover is a problem as well. If you bring on 100 clients and lose 80, you are only up to 20 clients. Even worse, you lost the potential to cross-sell to the 80 you lost. Focusing on Client Experience ensures that you minimize turnover, creating sustainable revenue.

3. Improve Customer Service

When everyone at your company understands the stages of the Customer Experience it begins to empower them to deliver better customer service. Without an understanding of the entire journey a prospect and customer have taken, individual employees are only making guesses about what they need to do. Good intentions may lead to actions that actually harm your Customer Experience. By mapping the entire experience and seeing it through the eyes of the customer you can come up with ways to improve your customer service.

4. Get More Referrals

Happy clients lead to referrals. Every sales rep knows that referrals have a high probability of closing. When you craft an engaging Customer Experience, you ensure that your sales team interacts with the customer after the initial sale. These interactions create the opportunity to ask for referrals.

5. Streamline Onboarding

We’ve all felt the cringe factor of a new employee interacting with a customer in a way that is counterproductive. Of course, we coach the employee to improve. Instead, what if new employees were able to see the entire Customer Experience through the eyes of an actual customer? They could review playbooks for each stage of the experience that explained the goals of the stage, the processes, the resources, and how their role fits into the overall experience. Mapping Customer Experience and then creating playbooks helps new team members feel comfortable in their role and assists them in getting up to speed as quickly as possible.

6. Allow Adaptability

Pivot could easily have been the word of the year for 2020. Companies that were able to adapt during the turbulent times of the pandemic were able to survive and thrive. When you have mapped out your Customer Experience you are able to adjust when the market shifts. These adjustments can be incorporated into modified playbooks when then filter down through your team. The end result is faster pivots.

All of these factors work together to make revenue more predictable. During uncertain times this predictability is more important than ever.

Originally published on Convergo.

How To Make Revenue Growth Predictable In Uncertain Times (Part 1)

Creating steady revenue growth can feel impossible during uncertain times. The headwinds of hiring challenges, price increases, and supply chain issues seem to threaten growth goals. While you can’t change the circumstances, you can be proactive in setting your company up for success, even in uncertain times. 

Over the next three articles, you’ll discover three ways you can make revenue growth predictable in uncertain times. These aren’t magic bullets. Instead, they are three ways to develop consistency and effectiveness by optimizing your marketing and sales.

Focus Your Message

The first way to make revenue growth predictable is to focus your message. 

Hang out in any sales training long enough and you will hear Theodore Roosevelt’s famous words: “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” This profound truth is violated by the majority of marketing and sales messages. 

The marketing message of most companies reads like this: Our great company sells our incredible products backed by our award-winning customer service. You should choose us because we are the best!

These things are fantastic. I’m proud of you. But nobody cares how much you know, how great your company is, how incredible your product is and how amazing your customer service is. At least not yet. What they care about first is that you care about them.

When we say “Customer First!” in our marketing and then go on to brag about how great our company is we show that the thing that actually sits in first place is our company. Buyers see through this. 

Saying “Our company is a customer-first company,” is like saying to everyone you meet, “I’m so awesome because I care a lot about other people!” Good for you, but it seems to me you care an awful lot about yourself. Why not just care for other people. By doing this, you demonstrate what you believe.

How do you demonstrate your care? You focus your message on what’s important to them. 

Simply put, you make sure that your marketing and sales messaging talks about the outcomes they want. 

In Revenue Growth Engine (Get your Free Copy here) I say that buyers don’t buy products or services, they buy the outcomes those products and services deliver. 

What is an outcome? You know your message is focused on an outcome when the potential buyer says in their head something like this:

This could help me achieve one of my top goals!
This could help me solve a nagging problem!
I’ve been looking for this for a long time. Finally!

You know your message is focused on an outcome when it is specific and not full of corporate adjective soup. 

“Our solution helps clients improve productivity, enhance security, and increase user satisfaction.”

Noise. Static. 

Is it true? Maybe.

Does it sound good? Sure.

Is it specific and relevant to the outcomes your buyer wants? Nope. 

So you get ignored. And when you get ignored you don’t get the opportunity. When there is no opportunity there is no new revenue. Sure, you may get some referrals from happy clients. But when it comes to predictable revenue growth you become largely ignored by the market in general. 

Focusing your message on the outcomes your buyers want gets you the attention you need to sell. 
You demonstrate that you care about the outcomes they want. 
You show that it is about them and not you. 
You communicate in a tangible way that their business and personal goals are important to you. 
You demonstrate that you focus on your clients and not on yourself.

Benefits of Focusing Your Message

What does focusing your message have to do with predictable revenue growth? 

1. You Get Attention in a Crowded Marketplace

The amount of static noise is astounding. Our minds are bombarded with thousands of messages every single day. To survive we are highly trained at tuning things out. We also have very sensitive BS meters.

Only two things will get my attention:

Something that will help me achieve a goal that’s important to me.
Something that will help me solve a problem.

An unfocused message does neither. Therefore you get no attention. No attention, no sale. 

2. You Get Found Online

Not only are buyers filtering out the noise, many of them are actively searching for things that will help them achieve their outcomes.

None of your prospective clients are asking Google, Siri, or their social networks, “Who is an awesome company that has incredible products and outstanding service?”

Instead, they are searching for answers to questions. They are looking for recommendations on how to solve their problem or achieve their goal. They are looking for ways other people have done it before. 

When you actually take the time to answer these questions, you get found. The title of Marcus Sheridan’s bestselling book sums it up: They Ask, You Answer. 

Helping your buyers find answers to your questions gets you found. This helps create more predictable revenue growth. 

3. You Get More At Bats

Once you get attention and get found, you get more at-bats for your sales team. However, I think it’s even better than getting more at-bats.

They say sales is a numbers game. In many ways that is true. To use a baseball analogy, the more times I get up to the plate and swing, the higher the probability I will get a hit. More at-bats are better.

Focusing your message gets you more at-bats. This helps create more predictable revenue growth. 

4. You Increase Your Close Rate

Sticking with the baseball analogy, what’s even better than more times at the plate is if I can get an easy pitch. I don’t want to swing at a 99 mile-per-hour fastball. I want to swing at a nice, easy pitch. My chances of getting a hit are much higher.

When you focus your message and lead with outcomes, not only do you get found and get attention, the pitches coming at you are much easier to hit. Your sales team does less “showing up and throwing up” and “hoping they find a pain point”  Instead, they are able to have a discussion about the specific outcomes the buyer wants. 

The more you focus the message on the outcomes your buyers want the more you increase your close rate and the more predictable your revenue growth becomes. 

5. You Build Trust

We’ve all heard the old sales adage, “Buyers buy from people they know, like, and trust.” How do we begin to build trust? We show that we care about them while also demonstrating our competency. 

Here is how you can begin to build trust. Focusing your message on the outcomes the buyer wants shows that you care about what’s important to them. Providing insight and ideas on how they can achieve their goals or solve their problems demonstrates your competency. This forms the foundation of trust.

My friend and Selling From the Heart Podcast co-host, Larry Levine, sums it up this way: “More trust, more sales.” The more you focus your message, the more you build trust. This helps create predictable revenue growth. 

How To Focus Your Message

How do you focus your message? It begins by understanding the outcomes your buyers want. 

Don’t overcomplicate this. Go to your current clients and ask them about their business. What are your top goals? What are your biggest challenges? Listen and learn.

Take what you learn and compare it to your marketing and sales message. Do these questions get answered on your website, blog, podcast, landing pages, or events? Do your sales talk tracks, tools, and collateral lead with this message?

The more you focus your message on the outcomes your buyers want, the more attention you will earn. You’ll get found giving you more at bats. You’ll have better conversations giving you a higher close rate as you build trust.

Three Reasons To Focus On Your Ideal Clients During Challenging Times

When times get tough, it can be tempting to look for revenue anywhere you can find it. As one of my first sales managers used to say, “If they can fog a mirror and sign an order, we’ll take it.”

The reality is that not all revenue is created equal. And, as I say in my own business, “Not all clients are created equally.” There are some clients who provide more value than others. In this current environment, it is more important than ever to focus on "ideal clients."

What is an ideal client? These are clients who need everything you sell. They have value because they are candidates for all of your products and/or services. They have fit because they align with your culture. Ideal clients are especially important when:

You have limited marketing and sales resources.

Unless you are a major company, chances are you have limited sales and marketing resources. If you try to market and sell to everyone, you will end up reaching no one. Understanding your ideal client profile allows you to focus your business development efforts on a specific group of prospects. You might tell your sales team, “You can sell to anyone, but 100% of the time you will call on these ideal prospects.”

With ideal clients, business development also takes on an additional dimension. Since these clients need everything you offer, the marketing and selling don’t stop when the first order comes in. In fact, selling and marketing begin with the first order. Focusing your business on ideal clients allows you to direct marketing and sales resources to harvest the additional revenue opportunities in these accounts.

You have limited operational resources.

The combination of the current supply chain crisis and the tight labor market clearly demonstrate that even the best companies have limited operational resources. In this environment where we are acutely aware of limitations, it makes sense to focus resources on serving the type of clients who have the most revenue potential.

The old adage, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” tends to be true in daily operations. The reality is that many of the squeaky wheels tend to be nonideal clients. As a result, many times it’s your nonideal clients who end up getting most of your team’s effort. At the same time, morale suffers. Resources get diverted away from ideal clients and you miss the opportunity to maximize revenue and retention of ideal clients.

In the book At Your Best, author Carey Nieuwhof explained how leaders can fall into the trap of spending their best time on fire drills and challenging employees rather than proactively investing in their top leaders. But we need to intentionally schedule time with our top leaders because this is what will drive the organization forward.

Similarly, it can be easy to let the team’s resources get diverted toward challenging clients who are not ideal for your business, thus causing you to neglect ideal clients. But your ideal clients are ideal because they are likely easy to work with. That means you need to intentionally invest time and resources in them, even if they are not being the squeaky wheel.

You have limited financial resources.

Revenue is the lifeblood of business. I conduct revenue growth workshops with businesses across multiple industries, and I have consistently seen that ideal clients have significantly more revenue potential. Plus, ideal clients will be those customers who are more loyal, value what you do for them and see you as less of a vendor and more of a partner. That means they have a much greater chance of sticking around. If you need more revenue, I believe ideal clients provide the most sustainable path. Since they value what you do, they tend to pose fewer problems.

Focus on ideal clients.

Now, more than ever, smart businesses focus on ideal clients. This begins by understanding your ideal client profile. Next, identify the current and prospective clients who fit the profile. This allows you to focus your sales, marketing, and operations efforts around attracting ideal clients and cross-selling all of your products and services to them to maximize revenue potential.

Originally published on Forbes

How Your Mindset Affects Revenue Growth

In The Upside of Stress, Dr. Kelly McGonigal showcases research on the power of mindset to affect outcomes. Those with a negative mindset toward stress experience much different results than those with a positive mindset toward stress. It turns out that mindset towards stress affects happiness, effectiveness, and even personal longevity. 

What we think about things matters. When it comes to stress, surprising research shows that it's not stress that is killing people, it’s the “combination of stress and belief that stress is harmful.” In essence, stress can be good or bad depending on what you believe about stress.

What if we took this same line of thought about mindset and applied it to growing revenue? What if what we believe about marketing and sales affects our results.

What if what we believe about marketing and sales affects our results?

How does mindset affect revenue growth? Here are some thoughts.

The Economy Is Terrible vs. Opportunity Is Everywhere

The news about the business landscape was grim in 1993 when I graduated from business school. Nobody was hiring. Many of my peers were discouraged about the economy. Over the past three decades I have lived through 9/11, 2008, and now, the pandemic. 

Watch the news and you will find many people tell you how the economy is terrible and things are about the fall apart. What they should be saying is that the economy is dynamic. Things are always changing. Shifts in the economy create opportunity. As entrepreneurs, sales professionals, and marketing leaders we can adopt the mindset that the ever-shifting economy is a threat. Or, we can choose to see the shifts as gateways to new opportunities.

Everything Is Changing vs. Change Equals Opportunity

With most of my sales and marketing career in the tech world, I’ve had the privilege of experiencing wave after wave of digital transformation. You would think that people in the tech world would welcome innovation. Yet, what I discovered many sales people that were pessimistic about change. 

Rather than embrace the continual progress of technology some viewed changing technology as a continual threat. The mindset they embraced was that new technology made things more complicated. It extended sales cycles. It made things harder. Sales managers made this worse by having a mindset that “This is too much for my reps.” This group struggled. 

Other sales professionals embraced new technology. They saw advancements in tech as an opportunity to grow. They had the mindset that change is good. These people thrived on change. Their mindset has allowed them to grow, creating new opportunities and making more money than ever.

Prospecting Is Harder Than Ever vs. There Are Many Powerful Ways to Prospect

It amazes me how much salespeople sabotage their success with self-fulfilling mindsets. Nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to prospecting. 

Some reps have adopted the belief that prospecting doesn’t work. My podcast co-host for Selling From the Heart, Larry Levine, is famous for saying, “Salespeople have hypnotized themselves into believing that what they aren’t doing doesn’t work.” These reps (and their leaders) also tend to believe that new ways to prospect are a waste of time. Things like social networks are a distraction. This puts this group in between a rock and hard place. They see old methods of prospecting as less effective than ever and believe that anything other than the phone or cold calling is a waste of time.

There are other reps that have adopted the mindset that while hard work, prospecting is easier than ever. Unlike the old days of smiling, praying, and dialing from a literal phone book, we now have the ability to identify ideal prospects, learn about them, and discover who they might know in our network. In addition to picking up the phone or walking into an office, we have the opportunity to communicate by email, video message, text message, LinkedIn inbox, customized cards, and more. We can get on a prospect’s radar through social interactions. We can even build out a personal brand that helps bolster trust.

The rep that adopts the mindset that prospecting is harder than ever will experience the dismal results of their self-fulfilling prophecy. The rep that sees the new ways to prospect can combine that mindset with hard work and create amazing results.

Marketing Is More Complicated and Cluttered Than Ever vs. Marketing Has So Many Amazing Ways To Change Minds

Thinking back to 1993 when I graduated from business school with a marketing degree makes me chuckle. Everything I had learned about marketing tactics would change that year as the internet became mainstream. In my early days of sales, the companies I worked with met with purchased advertising in the Yellow Pages, local newspapers, and sometimes television. They may have done some direct mail drops. That was it. 

Fast forward and marketing has exploded. Some business owners and executives have the mindset that marketing is more complicated and more cluttered than ever. Why bother? Let’s just stick our heads in the sand on marketing and double-down on sales. This group that used to spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on just the Yellow Pages has now all but abandoned their marketing budget. It’s just too complicated.

Others have the mindset that there are more ways than ever to get the message out. The evolving world of digital media continues to present ways to change minds. New platforms present new opportunities to communicate. While there are some complexities involved, the benefit of the multitude of audiences is seen as a net win.

How Much Does Your Mindset Toward Growth Cost You and Your Company?

I could go on talking about mindset around sales technologies, CRM usage, and training. The point is that mindset matters. This is especially true for leaders.

So many of the mindsets that hold us back are wrapped in seemingly good reasoning. We justify our closed minds with our years of experience and bias towards being prudent. While there are benefits to experience, what if you changed the way you thought about your experience. You have seen shifts in the economy and technology create opportunity. You have recognized that while hard work will always be required, there are new ways to prospect and create opportunities.

So, here is my questions for you: 

How much is your mindset costing you and your company? 
What parts of your mindset toward growth are holding you back?
Are you willing to change your mindset?

Originally Published on Darrell Amy's LinkedIn.

Why People Buy and How To Get Them To Buy More

Why do some buyers enthusiastically say yes to your offer while others simply shrug off your proposals? Why do many of your customers buy one of your products but seem to ignore your cross-sell efforts?

Part of the answer can be found in Clay Christensen’s “jobs to be done” theory. (See Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and The Cure) Clay believed that buyers don’t buy products and services. Instead, they “hire” products and services to do jobs that need to be done.

In Revenue Growth Engine I share a similar belief that buyers don’t buy products and services, they buy the outcome(s) the products and services enable.

When you understand the outcome your client wants (the job they want done) you become much more relevant.

1. Focus Your Message

The world is noisy. Every buyer is subjected to thousands of messages each day. As a result, we all have elaborate filters in place. The only things that get through our filter are messages around the jobs that we want done.

As I write this article I can hear the noise of the construction crew installing a swimming pool in my neighbor’s yard. What led him to this expensive and elaborate project? Chances are he wanted an outcome. The outcome was not a backhoe digging a hole and a cement truck pouring concrete. While that’s what it takes to build a pool, my guess is that what they really wanted was an outcome such as creating a draw for his teenage kids to hang out at their house instead of someone else’s. Maybe they wanted to bring some of the serenity from a recent resort vacation to their everyday life. Possibly they want to increase the value of the house before they sell it.

If I want to know the exact outcome my neighbor is looking for, I could go over and ask. You can do the same thing with your customers. Ask why they purchased the product from you. What outcomes were they looking for? What job did they hire your product to do?

Once you know this answer, focus your sales and marketing messages around the outcomes. Then and only then do you have a shot of getting through their filter. Once you get through the filter, you will stand out from your competitors because you will be the company that actually understands what they want.

2. Enhance Your Experience.

I agree with Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s work in The Experience Economy: customer experience is the last bastion of differentiation. In a world of “me-too” companies, the experience you provide your customers makes all this difference.

Meaningful customer experience takes on a new dimension when you think about the outcomes your customers want. Sure, it’s great to create an experience that is friendly, memorable, and fun. What if you could take it to the next level by considering how your customer experience could help your clients achieve their desired outcomes? What if the customer experience were actually part of the deliverable?

My wife and I have hired Hello Fresh to deliver pre-packaged meal kits to our home. Could we go to the grocery store and buy all of this stuff. Sure. But the outcome we want is a mini-date night without having to go through the hassle of getting dressed up, driving into town, and waiting for a table at a restaurant. That’s fun sometimes, but on any given Tuesday evening, we love pulling the interesting meal out of the box, sharing time together cooking, and then enjoying a meal together. Rather than stress over what’s for dinner and eating another boring meal from our regular rotation we get to enjoy an hour of cooking and eating. The outcome is a connection in the midst of a busy life. Hello Fresh knows this and has created a curated experience with interesting foods, fun recipes, convenient packaging, and even wine recommendations.

How can you make the experience you offer your customers part of helping them achieve their outcomes?

3. Cross-Sell More

Many companies struggle to cross-sell more to their current clients. They are great at getting the first deal but they struggle to sell other products and services from their portfolio. This confounds most business owners. “They already do business with our company. They know, like, and trust us. Why won’t they buy these additional things from us?”

The answer may be found in outcomes. Instead of assuming that just because they like your company they should buy more, why not ask, “What outcomes do my clients want?” Use this as the basis for cross-selling.

This conversation can go one of two ways. Understanding the job to be done that the customer hired you for in the first place, you can present additional or better ways to get the job done with more of your offerings. Alternatively, if you have completed the first job, you can highlight your success and then ask what other jobs need to be done. In either case, the cross-sell focuses on your ability to get jobs done (deliver outcomes) to your clients.

How Do You Find Out The Outcomes Your Clients Want?
Simple: you ask. Talk with your clients. Ask them why they bought it. Write case studies. Do customer research. Ask during quarterly business reviews.

Listen intently for the clues that will show you why people bought. (Hint: Filter out the content about how great your company and products are. Get past this ego-boost to the real reasons.)

Once you discover the job your customers hired you to do you have found the secret to your growth.

How to Soften Price Increases by Creating a Fallback Option

When faced with a price increase, clients may feel backed into a corner with only two options. One option is to take the price increase, sacrificing somewhere else in their budget. The other option is to stop buying from you and either forego the service or go through the hassle of finding another vendor.

Price increases typically create a “yes” or “no” scenario. Instead, what if you offered a third fallback option that was a scaled back version of your service?

Your fallback option could be lower-cost package with fewer benefits for your clients that are not willing to accept the price increase. You win because you keep the client. The client wins because they get to save money while keeping pieces of your offering.

The good news is that your fallback option not only can preserve revenue, it may also be able to preserve your profits. Done correctly, it may also create a strategy to go after your competition and get marketshare.

Here are a few things to consider as you create your fallback option.

Ask What Is Essential To Your Customers

When I was a kid most of the cars we had growing up had an AM radio, bench seats, and windows that you rolled down by hand. Now my car has an incredible surround-sound stereo system, multi-position heated buckets seats, and automatic windows. As much as I like these amenities, the reality is that I mainly need my car to get me to the airport and back. If cost-cutting were necessary, I could live without the fancy things.

Think about your products and services through the eyes of your customers—especially the ones who tend to be price-sensitive. What is most important to them? What can they not live without? What challenges are they facing that your offering alleviates?

Bob Moesta and Clay Christensen believe that buyers don’t buy products and services. Instead, they hire them for a “job to be done.” In the case of my car, I mainly hired it to get from point A to point B. Sure, I also hired it to provide some comfort, enjoyment, and status. But if times are tight what I mainly need is transportation.

Think about your offerings. What “job to be done” did your customers have that motivated them to purchase from you? What is essential and what is optional?

Your fallback option should include the essentials. In fact, you might even call it your “essentials” package. Strip away the surround sound, heated seats, and automatic windows. Offer a lower-cost option that still gets the job done. This allows you to keep your client while becoming a partner that also helps them achieve the goal of reducing their costs instead of raising them.

Consider You How You Can Preserve Your Profits

Just because you offer a fallback option with a lower cost does not necessarily mean that you need to lower your profits. Look for ways to package your “essentials” option in a way that has the same profit as your full offering.

Once you create your “essentials” bundle look at the cost of the product and/or service. 

Then, take the actual dollar amount of the margin you had on your full offering and add it to the essentials offering. If you use this as the price you can protect your profit.

Can you always protect your profits? No. However, sometimes you might find a way to even raise your profits.

Create a Campaign To Add Back Margins

For the customers that choose your fallback option instead of a price increase, build a marketing campaign that allows them to add back some of the options. You might let some time pass. Then start dripping out marketing that lets them add-in features. Make it easy to bring these back in.

For example, my TV provider recently raised their rates. If they had a fallback option, I might have opted for fewer channels to save some money. Over time, the provider would be smart to begin offering some of the channels I lost for an incremental increase in monthly fees.

You might be able to do the same. After some time has passed, launch a marketing campaign that invites clients to incrementally upgrade their experience with your company.

Go After Your Competition

As you create your fallback option you may discover a new offering that could attract customers from your competitors. Chances are your competitors are raising prices. Your “essentials” offering could be the thing that lures them away. Once you bring them on board you can expand the relationship.

Originally Published on Convergo.

The Key To Success No Sales Rep Wants To Hear

“Predictability and consistency are the unsexy keys to overall improvement.”

Jason VanCamp and the Mission Six Zero Team

Fellow sales professionals and entrepreneurs, I wish there were a magic pill. I wish there were some programs you could enroll in, some conferences you could attend, some hot new tactics you could adopt…

There isn’t.

As Jason VanCamp says above, it's the boring things that get you where you want to go.

High performing sales professionals are predictable and consistent in these five areas:

1. Prospecting

Fanatical Prospecting author, Jeb Blount puts it very plainly: “The number one reason for empty pipelines is failure to prospect.” There are simply no excuses here. Block the time. Make it a priority each day. Hit your number without cheating. Do it.

2. Client Engagement

Hang out with me for a few minutes and you’ll discover I’m passionate about the low-hanging fruit of cross-sell revenue. You need to engage with your top 20% of clients on a consistent basis. Make a commitment to reach out to them regularly. Commit to quarterly meetings with your top clients to learn about their business goals and challenges. In the process, you’ll sell more to them and develop a consistent stream of referrals. (Larry Levine our team of coaches at Selling From the Heart are having fun coaching reps on this in the Client Management course in Trust-Building INTENSIVE.) Do it.

3. Pipeline Management

For my B2B friends, we know that there are multiple decision-makers and influencers in a buying process. Nurturing deals through the pipeline requires understanding the outcomes each of these decision-makers wants. Block time to engage with people in your pipeline. Engagement does not mean annoying calls and emails saying, “Have you made up your mind yet.” Instead, engage with meaningful value, demonstrating that working with you will be a total win for them. Put this on your calendar. Do it.

4. Personal Development

You must invest in your personal development. If your company provides training, that’s awesome! Dive in. However, if you happen to work for a backward, short-sighted company that does not invest in developing its salespeople (and you don’t want to change jobs) you need to invest in yourself. Even if your company invests in you, consider that the bare minimum. Create your own learning plan. Enroll in courses. Hire a coach. Put this on your calendar. Do it!

5. Exercise

“I’m too busy to exercise.” Actually, you’re too busy not to exercise. Energy is the currency of success. You get energy by building capacity. You do this by exercising. I’m not talking about some fad diet to lose weight. I’m talking about a boring, relentless commitment to schedule exercise and make it happen. (My trick for exercise is to double up using that time for personal development, listening to courses, books, and podcasts.) Put it on your calendar. Do it!

How To Create Consistency
1. Use Your Calendar

I once heard someone say that next to the Bible your calendar is the most sacred book in your life. This is where you allocate your most precious asset: time. Block time for each of these critical activities. Plan your day each morning. Plan your week during the weekend, reflecting on what went well the previous week and making corrections for the following week. (I’m excited about the next edition of the Authentic Sales Planner System I’m developing!)

2. Get an Assistant

“But Darrell, I don’t have time for all of this.” If that’s actually true, it may be time to get an assistant. We call top salespeople “account executives.” What do executives have? An assistant. The executive assistant schedules meetings prepares documents, manages the database, and takes care of details so the executive can focus on their core competency. If you are in the six figures as a sales professional and stuck, what if an investment in an assistant could get you to the next level? Are you serious about your success? Do you want to be paid like an executive? Maybe you need an assistant.

3. Do Your 20 Mile March Every Day

Jim Collins, author of Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, shares the story of two teams heading to the South Pole in 1911. The members of one team died. The other team, led by Robert Amundsen, made it out. 

What was the difference? The team that died decided how far they would go every day based on the weather. If conditions were good, they hiked a long way. If conditions turned bad, they hunkered down. Amundsen’s team committed to march 20 miles every day regardless of sunshine or blizzard. Some days were harder than others. That’s just how it is.

The 20-mile march team won the prize. They made history, arriving at the South Pole and making out safely.

What’s Your 20 Mile March?

Right now I’m training to trek to Mount Everest Base Camp in late April. I’ve never done anything like this before. However, something in my heart said, “You are going to do this.”

Training for this mission basically involves long hikes up and down hills and boring sessions on a stair climber. 

On Monday of this week, I kicked it up a notch by joining The Deliberate Discomfort Challenge with Jason VanCamp’s team at Mission Six Zero. Each day I’ve committed to do a 20-mile march, working on six key areas of my life. 

The hardest area for me is the workouts: one hour of cardio and one hour of gym work each day. Monday went well. Yesterday, I started developing cold symptoms including headache and fatigue. However, remembering the 20-mile march, I pressed in. Yesterday evening’s workout was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

But It Sucks

Yes, it does. It’s hard. It’s even painful at times. You will want to quit.

In his book, Surf the Woods, entrepreneur and trailblazer, Holt Condren states it plainly: “It is very important that you normalize the inevitability of pain.”

Pain is part of the process. The reward is not only the life you want but also the character required to sustain it.

Predictability and consistency are the keys to success. Will you be willing to be boring in some key areas so you can become exceptional in your impact?

Originally published on Darrell Amy's LinkedIn. 

Creative Strategies to Increase Price

Increasing costs require many businesses to raise prices. Rather than just raise prices, what if you could take a strategic approach to cost increases? Following are ideas to get you thinking creatively about how you could handle this challenging situation.

First, consider if you are a core supplier or a vendor.

You are a core supplier if you are a key partner to your customers. You show up on their profit and loss statement as a cost of goods sold. Your offering is key to their success. An example might be a materials supplier to a manufacturer. You are critical to their business operations but you might also sell a commodity that is easy to replace.

You are a vendor if you provide something that is not a core part of the business. For example, you provide office equipment or bookkeeping service. You show up on their profit and loss statement as an overhead expense. In some cases, your offering may be optional or easily replaced. It’s not that your services are not important to your customers. It’s just that they think about you as an expense rather than a cost.

Core suppliers and second-tier vendors may need to approach the price increase conversation differently. Here are some ideas.

Core Suppliers

Here are some strategies that can work for high-relationship businesses where you are a core supplier to your customers.

1. Make It a Business Conversation

Rather than just send out an email or letter, use this as an opportunity to have a business conversation with your customers. Be empathetic. Ask about their business challenges. Be open about how the current business environment has affected your operations. Discuss how you made the decision to increase costs to maintain quality rather than sacrifice quality. Explain how you have done this by increasing wages, taking measures to alleviate supply chain issues. You could also share some long-term vision about how you are working to create operational efficiencies that will

2. Discuss Concessions in Exchange For Commitments

When key clients push back on price increases, use this as an opportunity to offer price concessions in exchange for commitment. For example, you might agree to continue previous pricing levels (or a level in between current pricing and the price increase) in exchange for a volume commitment over the next year. Be prepared for this by creating pricing tiers based on volume commitments.

3. Bundle Profitable Services

Similar to the commitment idea above, you could offer a bundle that includes profitable services. If you sell both products and services, consider ways to offer the same product price if the customer bundles in high-margin services.  If you don’t have a high-margin service to go with your products, you might consider services you could add. This could open up new lines of profitable revenue.

4. Add Temporary Fees Instead of Raising Prices

Rather than raise prices you can add or raise fees for your products. These could include shipping and/or handling, configuration, or installation. If you think your cost increases will be temporary, consider adding a temporary fee on orders.

Vendors

If you show up as an expense on your customer’s profit and loss statement here are some strategies you can use if you are an overhead expense to your clients.

1. Outsourcing Strategies

One way companies reduce overhead expenses is by outsourcing non-core functions. While your pricing for your products may go up, there may be a way that you can take over the entire function for a client. One recent example is QuickBooks. In addition to providing software, they now provide bookkeeping services. Their customers now have the option to outsource all of their book keeping to one vendor.

2. Vendor Consolidation

Could you provide more products and services to your customer? Another expense reduction strategy is vendor consolidation. From the customer’s perspective, fewer vendors to manage. You might consider offsetting the price increase for customers that are willing to bring more lines of business to you.

3. Rethink Your Offers

The hybrid work environment seems to be here to stay in many industries. Consider how you could re-package your offer to support the mix of people working at the office and working from home. If you sell to businesses, listen to the needs of your current customers. If you sell to individuals, their needs have likely changed as well. This is a perfect opportunity to realign your products and services around their needs. In the process, you can reconfigure pricing to account for cost increases.

4. Resize Your Options

This is a playbook from the food industry. To offset rising prices, some food providers are keeping their prices the same but reducing the amount of products. Could you do the same thing without affecting your customer? Maybe there is a way to repackage what you do so that you lower your costs but increase value.

Whether you are a core supplier or a second-tier vendor, there are many creative ways you can approach price increases. In the process, you might even discover ways to reinvent your offerings that make you more valuable to your customers while increasing your profits.

Originally Published on Convergo.