From Features to Transformation

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Advanced Selling Podcast – "From Features to Transformation"

Release Date: February 10, 2025
Hosts: Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale
Episode Title: From Features to Transformation

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Introduction

In this episode of The Advanced Selling Podcast, hosts Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale, seasoned B2B sales trainers and business strategists, delve into the pivotal shift from selling product features to facilitating customer transformations. Released on February 10, 2025, the episode emphasizes the importance of guiding customers toward long-term, transformative outcomes rather than focusing solely on immediate problem-solving.

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Key Topics and Discussions

1. Customer Transformation vs. Feature Selling

Bill and Bryan introduce the concept of customer transformation, highlighting the need for sales professionals to help clients achieve significant, desirable outcomes that extend beyond the immediate utility of a product or service.

• Bryan's Insight:
  "Our solution transforms or in some way creates a desirable outcome for the customer... they want to run toward a destination of some kind, and I call that destination a transformation."
  [09:00]

• Bill's Example with Gong:
  Bill discusses how their adoption of Gong, initially a call-recording tool, transformed their business operations and culture over three years.
  "We use it forever. We use it as a search tool, we use it to recap things... it's cultural."
  [09:28]

2. Long-Term vs. Short-Term Thinking in Sales

The hosts critique the prevalent quarterly and monthly focus in sales, advocating for a long-term, three-year perspective that fosters sustainable growth and cultural integration.

• Bill on Long-Term Vision:
  "How is life different three years from now?... we are so in the midst of making the month and the quarter and selling the thing that we talk about these very short-term gains."
  [07:41]

• Bryan on Organizational Emphasis:
  "Our emphasis, because of the way corporations are run... it's always on the 90 days."
  [12:35]

3. Positioning Solutions as Transformative

Bill and Bryan stress the importance of positioning products not just by their features but by the transformative impact they have on a client's business processes and culture.

• Bryan on Selling Transformation:
  "If you're selling transformation, you've got to be really good at describing that transformation and not making it so fantastic and glorious that no one believes it..."
  [09:44]

• Bill on Business Process Transformation:
  "It makes it much more palatable for me now because I'm looking at the long-term economic gain of it too."
  [13:08]

4. Documenting and Sharing Transformation Stories

The hosts encourage sales professionals to document customer transformation stories beyond the initial sale, emphasizing storytelling as a tool to connect with potential clients.

• Bryan on Customer Stories:
  "Interview them, talk to them, take them back there and just document those so you have a story to tell any new customer."
  [16:04]

• Bill on Transformation Narratives:
  "We need to document stories from customers past the three-year mark and onward."
  [15:01]

5. Roadmaps and Ongoing Customer Journeys

Bill and Bryan discuss the importance of creating roadmaps for customers that extend beyond the purchase, ensuring continuous engagement and support.

• Bryan on Roadmaps:
  "Once you work through that with a client or prospect, they understand. People understand roadmaps, they understand journeys."
  [14:20]

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Notable Quotes

• Bryan Neale [09:20]:
  "Most of us in our value set can actually offer transformation because we're helping people change how they think and how they see and how they react and how they act in the marketplace."

• Bill Caskey [13:08]:
  "It's 50 grand a year, so it's 150 grand all in three years, here's what things will look like. It makes it much more palatable for me now because I'm looking at the long-term economic gain of it too."

• Bryan Neale [11:45]:
  "Most can't [describe transformation]. And I'm sitting here thinking... you have two years' worth of stories to tell."

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Insights and Conclusions

Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale effectively argue that the future of successful B2B sales lies in facilitating meaningful transformations for customers. By shifting focus from immediate feature-based selling to envisioning and guiding long-term outcomes, sales professionals can foster deeper relationships and drive sustained business growth. The hosts provide actionable strategies, such as documenting transformation stories and developing comprehensive roadmaps, to aid sales teams in implementing this transformative approach.

Listeners are encouraged to reevaluate their sales strategies, prioritize long-term customer success, and leverage storytelling to illustrate the profound impact their solutions can have on clients' businesses.

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Action Items for Sales Professionals

1. Shift Mindset: Move from selling features to facilitating customer transformations.
2. Long-Term Vision: Focus on how your solution will benefit the customer over the next three years.
3. Document Stories: Collect and share transformation stories from existing customers.
4. Develop Roadmaps: Create detailed roadmaps that outline the customer's journey post-purchase.
5. Engage in Storytelling: Use narratives to help prospects envision the transformative impact of your solutions.

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For more insights and resources, visit Advanced Selling Podcast and connect on LinkedIn.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign. Welcome everybody to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in the history of podcasts. My name is Brian Neal.

[B]

My name is Bill Caskey.

[A]

Here every week for your listening enjoyment. If you are not part of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Insider, shame on us because we should have you there. Everyone should be there.

[B]

Hey, I've got a special offer. I've got a special offer too.

[A]

Lay it out.

[B]

It goes along with Insider. For the first quarter of the year, we're offering this book, complimentary. It's called 12 Bold Moves. It came. A lot of the content came from Insider. If you'll look in the description, Travis will put in the description, the link that takes you to the page where you can put in your email and download it. And it's 50 pages. To be honest with you, CEOs and presidents or sales managers, you could use this damn thing as a, as a 12 month training program. Just take one of the 12 and talk about it and, and do some creation. You could put it into AI and have it spit out magic. But go, it's free. 12 Bold moves. Check the link in the show notes.

[A]

That's good. And the website there, do we use the actual website? 12 Bold Moods for this one too.

[B]

No website. But if you're interested in, in the Insider, go to advanced selling podcast.com insider. The curriculum for the whole year is there too.

[A]

Oh, it's fantastic.

[B]

Okay, I've got a quick story and I've been laughing about this myself. You know, you and I have similar sense of humor 100 and sometimes things just strike us that you tell it to somebody else. I'm wary of saying this because I think you'd get a kick out of this, but I don't know population. Well, Guy comes over, he's a sound audio engineer. Guy comes over to look at our system because it's not working. And my wife is getting ready to put in a laundry room, kind of redo the laundry room. And that's where the rack for all the equipment is. And so we're gonna have to have it pulled out. And while we're, while it's out, I want to make some changes and you know where the signal goes and all that. So he looks at it and goes, okay. He said, yeah, wow, we can do that. We'll just come over before the construction starts, pull it out. He goes, what are you doing now? I said, the laundry room. I said, my wife, her mom died and left her a little bit of money. And so she's, you know, we're going to invest it back in our house. And. And she says, okay. Okay, good. So about two weeks later, he invites me to an open house. This company is having. You know who this is. So I'm not gonna say it's fair. Okay. But this local company, it's a, it's a great audio engineer company, but they do blinds and indoor outdoor lighting, and they do a lot of things and they have a new showroom they just created. So he invited me to come up and I did. It was really cool. I love, you know, like you, I love sound speakers. And he said, hey, Bill, come on over. I want to introduce you to, to our owner. I said, okay, good. So he comes over, he says, hey, Bill, this is Philip. Philip has owned our company here for the last 15 years. And Bill is a soon to be client. His wife has just acquired some inheritance and she's going to be redoing the laundry room. Now, recognize, this is an $800. This is an $800 thing. This is not an $80,000 thing. It's $800. Cheap, cheap. So I, I, you know, did my pleasant Teresa, I kind of looked at. Okay, all right. He brings me to another guy and he says, yes, Bill, this is Jason. And Bill's wife has come across, has come upon some money, and she's going to be redoing his. And it's like, what are we doing?

[A]

What are we doing? Everyone's like, well, did you hear about the gas? Well, apparently, apparently.

[B]

No, I don't.

[A]

They just got paid. They got the bag Dean's mom passed, and let me just tell you, their laundry room, I mean, I, I'd never leave. I wouldn't leave the lot. Wait till you see even that. I'm laughing with you.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Kind of funny on itself. I'm like, you know, well, my mom loves us some money, so, you know, we're gonna do what she always wanted. We're gonna put new racks in the laundry room. I'm like, is there something else we could do to honor Mom? Oh, it's so good. Love laundry.

[B]

Maiden name was Westinghouse. She goes way back with laundry stuff.

[A]

Oh, geez.

[B]

Or Outdoor life.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah. Take a vacation, a little staycation, whatever. Go spread her ashes in the Great Lakes.

[B]

I never thought about how stupid that sounds.

[A]

Oh, my gosh, that's funny. That's funny. Well, God bless. Yeah. Jane's mother. And she'll live in, in infamy, right underneath the Downey. So you see this rack? My head's going, here, check this out. Okay, You Ready? Close your eyes. I'm gonna open the door. Wait till you see this.

[B]

Jane was irritated because I told him that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I said, well, I told him that under the COVID of just. It was a throwaway line, you know, it was going to be circulated in a memo inside.

[A]

And now on a podcast. Oh, geez.

[B]

Now it's. Now it's on a podcast. So.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

Dan will start getting calls from investors.

[A]

I'll be in trouble. I might be in trouble now, too. That's funny. That is really funny. Well, would you. If you would, please take pictures, if you could, when you're done, and put them up on. On social in honor of.

[B]

I might do the next episode from the laundry room.

[A]

I'm kind of thinking Jane's mom's looking up from heaven a little bit pissed. Like, you serious? Like, seriously. And so here. Gonna honor me.

[B]

Anyway, I've got another topic today. That is. I've been playing around a little bit with this idea of customer transformation. And. And the idea that we had better become clear about how our solution. Our. I don't mean ours. I mean anybody listening. Your solution transforms or in some way creates a desirable outcome for the customer. And, you know, we typically have said, well, you got to find out what the problem is. And people want to run away from problems. They want to avoid problems. And I agree with that generally. But I also think they want to run toward a destination of some kind, and I call that destination a transformation. Now, transformation is a big word and sometimes a little vague, but the idea is that you, as a vendor, can help them get to a new place that they could not get to without you, and they certainly couldn't get to on their own. They might not even get to it with another vendor. But I don't think we have explicitly thought out where we take our customers, where we can take them. And I've done quite a bit of work in some public kind of environments on that. And I'm telling you, nobody has that information. And it's like, wait a minute. That's what we. That's what we do every day, is we try to help people run from pains, run toward pleasure. What is that? Pleasure? And so I'm wondering if you, A, think that is useful, and B, if you've ever done any work on that with your clients.

[A]

H, answer to A is absolutely. And I. And I see the problem the more. And by the way we intentionally build it and tell me the topic coming in. It was. It was a cold, cold topic. So I'm thinking of it.

[B]

I was thinking about never telling you the.

[A]

Yeah. Just. Just talking. I just sit here and just dream about. Dream about the laundry room. It's like, oh my God. What I.

[B]

Come on, man.

[A]

I love it. I love it. Is. We are so. This is a time horizon thing for me that we are so in the midst of making the month and the quarter and selling the thing that we talk about these very short term gains or lifts from a software from a. The thing I sell from a. I sell logistics equipment. What. What's going to happen? You're going to start to see things although you start to see this and then this will happen. But what do those things lead to over three years. How is life different three years from now? And I'm thinking right now about things that I or we have done in our own firm that we started years ago and I look now that are culturally embedded. I'll. I'll say one, we use a software called Gong G O N G. We've had Ahmet this founder on our podcast when, when they were just a little, little company we're just starting out now. They're like worth $6 billion. Gong is entrenched in everything that we do. It's one of our favorite. We like, we almost like look forward like let's see what Gong. It's so good. When we started, it started off as call recording software and that was good. But what it's led to is transformation. I mean we use it forever. We use as a search tool, we use it to recap things. We use it to prep for keynote speeches and all sorts of things and is embedded in our culture now. It's cultural. So much so that we talk about it this way to others. But that's not how it started. And I'm not like dissing the salesperson.

[B]

No, no, no.

[A]

But, but you know, we bought it for the sort of like feature functionality but. But now they can sell it for feature functionality. But what they should sell it for is transformative business operations. Because it truly is what it's done. It becomes part of our culture.

[B]

And sometimes if they were to start positioning it that way, people may say, oh come on now.

[A]

I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Cultural. I mean it's a. Yeah. So you've got to be, if you're selling transformation, you've got to be really good at describing that transformation and not making it so fantastic and glorious that no one believes it, but lead them through. Well, here's here. When I say it's going to change your culture. Here's here's how it's going to do that. Step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then people say, oh, okay, logically I could see the path toward culture change, but if they, if the sales professional does not do that or doesn't even understand the, the kind of, the premise of transformation, they'll just be selling recording, you know, recording stuff.

[A]

Yes. And that's a good example in our space too. We see this, we see people like, hey, here's a, here's a email cadence with this message. And I booked, you know, 22 meetings off of a hundred of these. Go send it. That's just like a, now that's like a little bit of a late switch. It's like, how do I change my whole business process so that those leads come to me that I don't have to do the outbound, you know, that sort of thing.

[B]

And, and the weird thing is that did my voice go up there?

[A]

The weird good way, in a good.

[B]

Way is that we all, I would venture to say 90% of us in our value set can actually offer transformation because we're helping people change how they think and how they see and how they react and how they act in the marketplace, which eventually leads to more fulfillment, better psychology, more confidence, more money, whatever those more things are. We just don't spend the time to look deep enough to say, well, how can this recording device and platform really help customers? I mean. Yes. Is it possible that you could build a business from this? Yeah, of course. Is it possible that it could change your culture and you could hire people and it's all because of this? Yeah, but if the sales organization can't really narrate that, then it's, it's, it's not this.

[A]

And they. Most can't.

[B]

Most can't.

[A]

Most can't. And I'm sitting here thinking, and I'm doing a little thumb in the air math, but if you have. So take away startups, like brand new startups, they don't have a story to tell yet because they've got a proof of concept thing. But once you get to a third year of anything, you have two years worth of stories to tell. And things can transform in two years. Maybe not all the way, but you can look and say, yeah, we, we plug this. You know, you own parking lots, you put parking lot software in there and you, you for two years now, you're like, man, remember what it used to be like two years ago we had to do all this stuff by hand. We had to do these Excel spreadsheets. Now I can pop my phone up, I can see all of our data, I can see how many spaces are available. It's like unbelievable. Now everyone has that past that two, three year mark. That's right. They don't know how to articulate it.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

With that. That's right.

[B]

And I think you're right in that the emphasis is always on the quarter or the month or the short term. And when we are short term thinkers, we can't have our process, we can't lead our prospects to long term thinking because that's not how we're thinking. We don't really care about three years down the road for them. All we care about is they're gonna, they're gonna do it this month so I can get paid for. Yeah, I, I don't mean that we, we don't think about the customer at all. But come on, our emphasis, because of the way corporations are run and financials are run, it's always on the 90 days.

[A]

It also at when you, when you get into a pricing situ situation. And I'm looking in that short term of okay, this going to cost me 50 grand this year to put the software in. If I can be guided outward and say okay, it's 50 grand a year, so it's 150 grand all in three years, here's what things will look like. It makes it much more palatable for me now because I'm looking at the long term economic gain of it too, which we also don't tend to. And just like any, I just met with a kid who started a his own personal training business looking for some advice. Great, great young guy. And we talked about fitness and sales or fitness and marketing are literally the same thing. You do consistent behavior over a long period of time, you see results, that's it. And we, and I think we're trying to do this well, let's just do a water only diet for 30 days. Yeah. You will lose. Yeah, yeah. And I think sales people fall into that trap. Let's do a quick campaign, let's do a blitz. You know, we gotta push, we gotta push, we gotta try to make the course push, push, push, push, push. And then we wonder why the next quarter is so slow to start. Because we're not thinking long term.

[B]

The blitz mentality versus the transformation mentality. Yeah, yeah. We're doing some things that we're helping companies come up with roadmaps for the future. Like where are you today and where do you want to be and what are the steps that are going to help you get there. Once you, once you work through that with a client or prospect, they understand. People understand roadmaps, they understand journeys. And don't give me this stuff about the customer journey. Okay, I've heard about that. If you don't have a road map to help the customer, not just buy from you because most customer road, customer journeys are about. It ends when they buy.

[A]

It does.

[B]

I'm talking about. No, that's when the road, the road map to transformation begins when they buy.

[A]

Yes. So true. And from a tactical standpoint, the big miss here I think is, is the documentation of stories from customers past the three year mark and onward. And you have to take people back to what it was like before. I'm even thinking of a, a tool we invested in. We're three years in. We're literally exactly three years in. We'll be meeting with our business coach who's our implementer in this program in two weeks and it will be interesting for me to sit down and think what were we doing before he showed up and before the system showed up? And I'd have to think about it. But I bet if I think about it, I'm like, oh my God. We are like a different bunch of human beings. It's that three year vision. But it's hard to go back to and customers. You need to as a salesperson go back to your customers and ask them these questions like yeah, document those stories, get their voice.

[B]

What's. Yeah, that's the whole. What, what hap. What was life like? What happened and what's life like today?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's kind of the rehab aa n a yeah. You know, kind of framework for your story is what was life like? What have. And what's life. And then, and then again what's life like today and what could life be like tomorrow? If you can continue down this path with you as a, as a vendor, do some thinking on that and make sure you go to advanced sellingpodcast.com LinkedIn, weigh in on this concept, see if it fits for you. We might even do. Maybe we should do a poll or something on that site. But we'd love to hear.

[A]

Yeah. And if nothing else, just take tactical to do here to go think about customers who you know, have transformed and just go interview them, talk to them, take them back there and just document those so you have a story to tell any new customer. That's how people can put their, their head around this is when they hear a story of another thing they can connect to it so go do that. That's a good thing to do.

[B]

It's good. All right, man. Good job today.

[A]

Cheers.

[B]

I'll see you next time. Bye. That.