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You're listening to the Sales Hunter Podcast. My name's Mark Hunter, the Sales Hunter. And did you know that your sales process is broken? I'm talking your sales process is broken. But did you get the memo? You see, it's time we get real and admit that things are not working nearly as well as they used to just a couple years ago, let alone five or 10 years ago. What is it that we're supposed to do? What is it that we need to change? That's the topic of today's subject. And we start the show right now. You're listening to the Sales Hunter Podcast with Mark Hunter, where the focus is to help you, as a salesman, sell with confidence and integrity. And now, here's your host. Okay, I just said your sales process is broken. And did you get the memo? And you see, here's the whole situation. I don't care who. Who you are and how successful you think you are. It's amazing how the number of email responses you're getting from what you send out and phone calls you do just don't deliver the results. Customers are ghosting us and everything. So what is it that we supposed to. Okay, here's what it comes down to. We have to get focused tighter than ever. Tighter than ever. You see, it's harder for us to reach anyone. And so the norm is this, that, you know, the door has been more leads, more emails, more communication, more conversation in more of everything is just not working. You see, today it's about being focused very tight. And what does this mean? This means actually less is actually more. Less is actually more when it comes to prospecting. Now, now, I'm not it. You got to be focused on who your perfect customer is. And I can't stress this enough because what's happening is we are spending valuable cycles chasing people who have interest but not intent. We have to get to intent as fast as possible. You see, the challenge is this. We wind up with people who are in our lead file, so to speak, in our CRM system too easily. And what I want to do is this. I want to find those people who are undoubtedly educating themselves outside of us. Now, let's get something on the table. The percentage of people who are reaching out to customers early in the buy cycle is just getting less and less. I've seen studies where it's 67, 68% of the way through the sales process, through the buying process. Then customers finally say, hey, I can use some assistance. You see, our challenge here is this. We have to be in the habit of De. Educating the customer. De Educating the customer. Okay, now here's where I'm going with this. Information has been democratized. You can find out anything you want by just spending time on the web. And it is, there's so much information out there. It's, it's a flurry. But the challenge is, is it always right? Is it always accurate? And what we have to do is we have to say let's get kind of tight, let's get kind of focused. And what I want to say is there are times that we're going to have to de. And I don't want to say time almost all the time. We have to de. Educate the customer. It starts by understanding where the customer is coming from. And this, these are the questions that you have to ask because now this begins to help you understand separate buyer interest from buyer intent. You see, I want to be asking customers questions. What is it that you know? What is it that you're trying to solve? What have you looked at up to now? What have you found of interest? You gotta be willing to ask those questions and variations of that. And I know that scares a lot of people. But you can't be scared by it the sooner you ask questions like that because you gotta understand where they're coming from. Now here's the key. The key is not asking the question. So what have you looked at so far? The key is not asking that question. The key is what comes next. Because what I want to do is I want to be able to ask the follow up question. I want to ask the next question. And the reason I do this is very simply now I'm really understanding whether or not we have interest or intent. But more importantly then what I'm going to do is I'm going to sit there and answer the question. So what are some of the other options you've looked at? And they're going to share with me and I'm going to ask them a question on that. I may ask them another question, but now I share them. A story. A story. Now here's the whole thing. Stories sell and they sell well. Now here's the whole deal though. The story has to be one that they can relate to. It's not you being superhuman. No, that's the last thing you want to do. You want to share with them a story that they can see themselves in. Now this isn't story time. Read the story for 20 minutes and have the customer fall asleep on you. No, it's that 32nd story. Yeah, I've seen this. I'VE I've seen this in other customers very similar to you who experience the same thing. And here's what they found. In other words, by doing this, what you do is you make it safe for the customer to de. Educate themselves. Yeah. Because if I tell you that you're stupid, you're gonna, you're gonna throw a bomb at me, you're gonna walk away from me. But if I share with you insights that allow them to begin to see, then they can begin to re. Educate themselves. Now here's the beauty about this. Does this happen on a single call? No. Okay. Now, I'd love for it to happen on a single call, but it rarely does. You see, I can do this over a series of 3, 4, 5 calls. The key is this. I have to make sure that I always link back my next conversation to the previous one. Okay. I always got a link back. I always look back in this, and this pulls the customer in and has them saying, okay, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, I remember that. And it says that you value their opinion. You see, here's the whole thing. Is this going to take more time? Yeah, yeah, it's going to take more time. This is why you can't have a thousand leads. It just doesn't work. It doesn't work. This is why the tighter your focus, the better off you're going to be. Because here's the whole thing. You can't be prepared for every situation you're going to encounter out there. This is why knowing your ICP is so key, so clear. So, okay, so how do you go about this? Because here's the whole thing. Every prospect you deal with, every lead that you deal with, every customer you deal with is going to have different questions. They really are. They're going to have different questions and they. They are, they are gonna have different expectations. In fact, your. Shall I say, the value proposition is going to be different. Yeah, value proposition is going to be different. But here's the whole thing. If I play in one sandbox, then I just got to know that sandbox, and that's what's key. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to, for the next couple of weeks and go back in your CRM system, go back to your notes and make a list of every comment, every observation that customers have shared with you over the previous couple weeks from your CRM system and as you go on forward, make it. And what you're doing is this. You want to find out kind of where they're coming from you want to find out because this is going to help you understand what is the level of DE education that you have to do. And for some of you, you may have to do a tremendous amount of de education. For others it might be not much. You see in one regard, if all you're doing is having to switch them from one vendor to you, that de education looks different than if you're having to de educate them from. Well, I can't do this process at all. This system isn't going to work and I'm going to have to go in a completely different direction. Now I'm having to really de educate and educate. So that's going to be a challenge. That is going to be a challenge. So what I, what I want you to do is this, once you be writing down all of these statements that your customers have shared with you, okay. And then what I want you to do is I want you to write down what's the question I should ask off of this. Now again, I shared with you some kind of some basic ones up front. What are some of the other options you've looked at? How long have you been having this issue? What are. And again, those are some basic. And again, go back to the beginning of this podcast and listen to those questions again. But what I'm getting to is I want to get to something a little more exact. Again, the tighter I can be on what it is that they, that the statement they're making regarding what it is it might be they've looking for this particular brand, this particular ability to bolt it into this or connect to that better off your question's going to be. Now here's the key thing though. You're going to ask the question, but then what you want to be doing is listening for their response because then that's going to help me then say what my follow up question is. And this is key. I'm going to have what my follow up question is. And now when they share with me, I can begin to share a story. Here's what I found. Do not go sharing a story until you've drilled down at least twice. This is key because otherwise what it makes it feel to the customer like you just wanted to share the story, you just wanted to share the story. But if you ask them a question, let them share and then you ask a follow up question, they come back and now you share a story, it feels more authentic because again, it is more authentic because you may very well have changed the story. It may be a completely different story than what you were going to share earlier and more importantly what it does is now being set up to where this is a conversation. And this is absolutely key. Stories have to come across as if it's part of the conversation. If the story is not set up as part of the conversation, you might as well just give them a link to a YouTube video. That's really all you're doing. So what I gotta do is I got, I have to spread this out. And again, this is why it may take place over several calls. Now you may have three or four statements that the customer's sharing with you. Fine, fine, great. I've got to have that question and that follow up question and a story that goes with it. But the more robust I am in understanding this and the more robust I am, what I'm going to do is I'm going to be more confident as I'm talking with the customer and as a result, the customer is going to be more confident to me. Now remember something, the customer does not buy until they have a level of confidence in the purchase decision they're about to make. And the fact that, oh, they're not going to make a mistake. They are not going to make because the last thing they want to do is make a mistake. They can't afford to make a mistake. Right, you see, so this is why you have to provide them with overwhelming evidence. The story does that for you. So here's the situation. You may wind up with eight to 10 statements, facts that they share. And oh, by the way, you can do the same thing with objections. You can do the same thing with objections because many times the statement that they make is, is kind of an objection too. So that's fine. Yeah. And then I'm going to have that question and that follow up question. Now the follow up question may not always be the one you write down because again, they may share something. That's fine that this is your knowledge, this is your expertise, but the key is this, that you have that story ready. And the story has to be told in a manner that the customer can relate to, that they can see themselves as being part of it. Because if they don't see themselves as being part of it, then guess what, it's just not going to resonate. But what I found is this. I will de. Educate the customer faster to allow me to educate them by the sharing of stories. Now does this mean that I have a story for every statement that they share? No, no, no. You never want to get beyond more than a couple of stories on a sales call or a series of sales calls. If every time the customer talks with you you share another story, they're going to begin thinking you're just story time for their afternoon nap. No, see, the story has to resonate, has to be sharp. That's why you got to be thinking about these. But again, you've had enough experience looking at previous customers you've worked with that you can relate them. Keep it short, keep it tight, and it's amazing at the success you're going to have. Hey, I want to do, I want you to do yourself favor. I want you to pick up my book integrity first selling. February 17th release date. It's out there. I want you to grab it because it's designed to do one thing. I have found that our sales process is broken because we're got all this AI stuff and that's the Yang. And Integrity is about the Yang. And what I just shared with you is all integrity centered. It's all integrity centered. It's all in the book. I break all of this down for you and I want you to pick up that book Integrity First Selling. Hey, my name is Mark Hunter, the sales hunter. I do two episodes a week, one like this where we really go through a single topic and second one is where I do it with a subject matter expert. Hey, if you're also having a SKO sales kickoff meeting or any kind of meeting, I want you to reach out to me. Just last week I had two different events going on. One was live, one, one was online. Again this week I got multiple events happening in person and online. I want you to reach out and connect with me because sales is incredible profession. No, it's not a profession. It's a lifestyle of serving others. Hey, remember, pick up the book Integrity First Selling and I'll see you on the next episode of the Sales Hunter podcast. My name is Mark Hunter. Great selling.