All sales leaders and salespeople face three challenges: finding the right level of connection with the buyer, having the right depth of conversation with that buyer, and increasing the rate of conversion. Sales thought leader Bernadette McClelland finds the root cause of these challenges in the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople or the stories we tell the buyer. In this conversation, Bernadette McClelland unpacks the concept of “story-selling” and shares its six essential principles that will take your sales prowess to the next level. She also talks about the key things discussed in her latest book, SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. Prepare to take some notes as we pick the mind of one of the greatest selling wisdom purveyors anywhere!
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Story Selling: Six Key Principles To Level Up Your Sales Prowess With Bernadette McClelland
Thank you very much for your great words of encouragement while we took a little bit of an extended vacation here in the summer. We did take a trip to Italy and eat way too much pizza and pasta, Donna and I, but we’re back at it now, and we’re so excited. We’ve got some wonderful shows coming your way as we lead up to the end of Q4 2023. None better, by the way, than the one that’s coming at you right now. I had a fantastic conversation with Bernadette McClelland. Bernadette is with 3 Red Folders, that’s her consulting company.
She’s written a wonderful book called SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. This is Bernadette’s sixth book and she’s had some great testimonials in her books. I enjoyed this. The core concept we get into this is talking about story selling. That’s opposed to storytelling. We’ve had, as you know, a number of guests on the show talking about storytelling, which for the most part takes us through the hero’s journey.
Bernadette differentiates with story selling, the model she came up with. She did it to actually address three key issues a lot of sales leaders and salespeople face when they’re going to market. 1) Finding the right level of connection with a buyer. 2) Having the right depth of conversation with the buyer. 3) Increasing the rate of conversion as we work through these sell cycles to get to closure. These are three challenges most sales leaders and salespeople face.
The root cause that Bernadette came up with for these challenges is the stories involved, whether these are the stories we tell ourselves as salespeople, the stories we tell the buyer or the stories we elicit from the buyer. Some of the principles of great story selling that Bernadette comes up with and we discuss in this episode are six of them. Story selling inspires change. It’s root cause-focused. It’s a strategy in pictures. It helps to de-risk decisions for the buyer. It increases collaboration and generates wisdom and meaning. It’s a great conversation with Bernadette.
One of our other books, by the way, is called, When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going. What a title. By the way, some good advice. I enjoyed speaking with Bernadette. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy this episode. When you do, please continue to like and subscribe to The Selling Well show and tell your friends because that matters to us. Thank you for doing so. Here’s Bernadette McClelland.
Bernadette, thanks so much for joining the show. It’s so great to meet you.
Same here. Thank you so much for the invitation.
I haven’t completed the whole book, but I enjoyed SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom. It’s impossible for that to be a bad idea. We’re going to unpack what story selling means. I love your approach here. Bernadette, to start, let’s talk a little bit about your journey in professional sales. How’d you get here?
It’s been a journey, hasn’t it?
It always has. It always is.
Journey with lots of turn-backs, dead ends, and freeways where you go for it. I’m fortunate I was granted immediate residency to live in the United States. The reason I’m sharing that is because the way that I came over was based on immigration and the US government recognizing the fact that I am an alien. I’ve always been like an alien, but I have an exceptional ability in sales leadership. That means a lot to me because when I first wanted to go into sales in corporate Australia, I was a sales coordinator and I was doing all the commissions and doing all the orders for the sales guys back in the ‘80s. It was like, “He’s earning that much?”
SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom
I applied, but they kept knocking me back by saying that I wasn’t aggressive enough. I didn’t have what it took to be in sales, and I was too nice. I hope that I’ve dialed back the aggressive part that did come out that enabled me to get the job. My journey over the years has taken me from corporate Australia through small business in Australia owning a family business, a wholesale, retail, and importing business, and coming full circle back to running my own consultancy. That’s been the journey.
You’ve got some wonderful testimonials from some of the biggest names in the industry like Jeb Blount and Tony Robbins. Folks will certainly check out those as we move forward. What an interesting piece of feedback back to the ‘80s where somebody would get coaching that you are too nice to be in sales, not aggressive enough. Right now, we wonder why there’s this 50-year-old stereotype about a professional salesperson that’s completely wrong. Of course, it’s wrong. Those of us who know anything about sales know that stereotype is inaccurate.
In fact, it was the impetus for Dan Pink. You quote Dan Pink multiple times in SHIFT and DISRUPT, but he wrote to sell as human. He saw such a gap between that stereotype of professional sales and what he saw when he was interacting with his own personal contacts and professional sales who were intellectually curious, great at problem-solving, and creative. We had him on the show a little while back.
In the end, I asked him why he wrote the book. That’s what he told me. He said, “There was such a gap between the stereotype that didn’t apply and where we are now.” This is your sixth book. In this episode, we’re talking about SHIFT and DISRUPT. Prior to that, The Art of Commercial Conversations. The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself and 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale!. What are the two other books?
When You Are Going Through Hell, Keep On Going.
That’s good coaching.
SMASH Through Your Sales Barrier! was my very first book.
I may get the book wrong, but I appreciated the authenticity of your story. After writing 25 Ways NOT To Lose Your Next Sale! I think it was Matt Church who asked you and said, “Does this book inspire you?” You said no.
I was doing a lot of work with Matt Church. He’s the Founder of Thought Leaders Global out of Sydney, a wonderful community. He did. I worked with him. The book was The First Sale is ALWAYS to Yourself. It was my first attempt at moving my writing into a more thought leadership style bringing in my own IP, mental models, and all of that. Matt said to me, “Bernadette, did it inspire you?” I, hand on heart, it didn’t. What I was doing there, in my growth and in my experimentation, was writing, thinking, and bringing some form of wisdom into my writing. It was probably a little bit too much left-brained, and that’s okay. For ourselves to be inspired, there has to be a spark of something.
SHIFT and DISRUPT has brought together the rational thinking that you mentioned. There’s research in there, but there’s also a story. There’s also that inspirational component because not only us as sales professionals but our buyers need that combination as well. When we think about the fact that our oldest form of communication is story and our oldest form of commerce is selling, it made sense to bring the two together, create this portmanteau, and lean into story selling as a concept and philosophy. Not a methodology, but as a philosophy.
I did a little bit of research before I created my model. Everywhere I looked, we hear story selling, but it’s usually about marketing, presentation skills, brand management, or it’s bringing in the hero’s journey. I wanted it to be different and practical. There are some wonderful experts out there in the storytelling space. I wanted to recognize them as well, but I also wanted to bring in a flavor that took a salesperson’s or sales professional’s conversations to not just a higher level but a deeper level because that’s what our buyers are wanting now.
It’s an interesting delineation. We’ve had a number of guests on the show about storytelling and probably one of the more popular books out there is Building a StoryBrand.
Yeah, absolutely.
It always speaks of the hero’s journey. It actually makes that reference and says, “What you’re doing with your storytelling is you’re making the buyer the hero of the journey, but you’ve got to go through that process.” From the book, when you’re trying to differentiate or delineate between storytelling and story selling, which we’ll get to in a second, you actually say story selling is a philosophy that helps a business, its leadership, and its sales team shift how they think and feel about achieving their business outcomes and revenue goals while ethically supporting the buyer.
It helps them see the gaps they didn’t know existed and find puzzle pieces they never knew they were missing. The approach you’re taking here is by going at this way and taking a little bit of a different approach, not only am I helping the buyer but I’m actually helping my team. In doing so as a leader, that means I’m helping myself. Tell me a little bit about how else we differentiate storytelling from story selling.
To begin with, it is based on a model. It’s based on what I refer to as the story-selling circles. To keep it simple, what I’d like to start with is the concept that growth sits at the center of a Venn diagram. We are going to imagine that there’s a Venn diagram. Growth sits at the center. It doesn’t matter if it’s for our buyer. We want to help our buyer and their business grow. We also want our own business to grow as well. Growth is the center.
We then think, “What are the three key challenges that a sales leader faces with their sales team or a sales person faces in going to market?” Those three challenges typically are the right level of connection, to start with. If we think about a salesperson’s role is to go out there and to approach the decision maker. There’s this right level of connection. Once that happens, it’s like, “What’s the depth of conversation? How can we stop playing in the shallows? How can we take our conversations deeper?” Connection is a challenge. The depth of conversation is a challenge and then the rate of acceleration of the pipeline conversion is a challenge. Those are the three challenges that I believe a sales leader faces with their team and also a salesperson faces in going to market.
The root cause of those challenges is found at the intersections. This is where story selling comes into play because when we look at the root cause of the challenges, what’s stopping connection, conversations, and conversions is typically three stories. Those three stories are the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer, the deal, the complaint, or whatever it may be. It’s the internal stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer. The external stories are the stories the salesperson tells their buyer. Finally, it’s the essential stories. They are the stories the salesperson must elicit from the buyer.
The outcome is growth. We’ve got the three challenges of connection, conversation, and conversion. We’ve got the three root causes. What I’ve done in the book is I’ve built it out even more. I’ve looked at those three root causes and said, “What needs to happen for that salesperson to strengthen their internal stories and elevate their connection? What needs to happen for that salesperson to tell the right stories, collaborate with the buyer, and deepen their conversations? What needs to happen for that salesperson to actually elicit the right stories so that they can accelerate their rate of conversion?” They are the nine-story modes. They are basically the core of SHIFT and DISRUPT.
Let’s unpack a little bit of this. As I’m playing along and the folks at home will, when they buy this book, we take a look at what you identified as that beta blueprint. I know you had a background in neural linguistic programming and you were actually a coach for Tony Robbins at one point in time for a certain region of the world, and he’s very big on this as well. Let’s talk about those first stories or the stories that the salesperson tells themselves about the buyer.
There are three. You are right, I’ve got every piece of conceivable paper known to mankind and womankind.
By the way, they’re not in your office behind you.
No one has ever asked to see a copyright.
We’re going to have to do fact-checking on that after the fact. We’ve got a team who does that. It’s the same people who do research.
You did say that we are not theorists but practitioners. This is the whole thing. I look back over my self journey as well, and I think the realization hit me once I started to dig a little deeper and take my learning to a level that was based on personal leadership. I bring together personal leadership. I’ve mentioned thought leadership and sales leadership so I bring those three attributes together. In the personal leadership component of it, I’d never drunk the Kool-Aid, but I was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to not just deepen my practical understanding by working with leaders around the world through that vehicle of coaching. I also spent eighteen months doing a diploma in all things coaching, so executive coaching, sales coaching, and business coaching.
That was in Australia and I did that separately. That was where the realization came in around being able to tap into communication at a deeper level and marry in psychology. That’s why I call the story selling circles, I shift and disrupt. The whole philosophy is pretty much based on five disciplines. It’s like a Swiss army knife. I’m bringing in disciplines of definitely story as a component. It’s very much mental models, but psychology neurolinguistics and what I refer to as a coach approach. I’m big on the fact that salespeople, when they can go to market and be able to coach their buyers rather than sell them.
Ultimately, we are there to make a sale but the vehicle to do it can shift. The three stories that fit under the internal stories, those first three that I have identified as being huge red flags, identity, how a sales professional or a sales leader views their identity, how do they show up, and are they congruent with their role. Quite often, there is this belief system that I don’t want to be perceived as a salesperson. If you are going to go into a conversation with a buyer and you have that as a belief, it’s going to play with your energy levels.
We hear this all the time. One of the core missions of our entire business is to align the concept or the verb of selling with exactly what you talked about, which is all we’re selling is helping the buyer achieve a better outcome. Selling is management consulting. The stereotype is 50 years old of selling is pedaling or cajoling, but that’s been wrong for 25 years. It’s 50 years old, but it’s been completely wrong for anybody who sold anything material in the last 25 years.
Yes, I understand the concept of serving the buyer and helping the buyer. That is our role.
It’s educating the buyer. It’s bringing the perspective of how they can run a better business with your solution or how they can run a better business with insight and knowledge.
I agree with that. There is also another component to this in my thinking. It’s all good and well. We are there to serve, to help, and all the rest of it, but we’re also there to help ourselves. This has got to be to serve the buyer and our company. It’s got to be a win-win. If you go in purely with some salespeople, with this whole servant leadership approach, or “I’m there to serve,” that may actually tap into money beliefs. Also, that may impact the ability for a salesperson to not hold margin if we are there to help them and we are being told by the buyer that, “You’re too expensive.” It may be that that salesperson defaults to discounting. It’s little nuances like that.
Serve the buyer and serve the company. It needs to be a win-win.
I do think they’re different things. We’re no different than a management consultant is in to help a client. Helping a client doesn’t mean making sure we do it at a loss or affecting margin and discount, but the reality of it is if I’m taking the right approach as a salesperson to focus on helping them, things like pricing and discounts don’t matter.
I also believe that there’s another thought process I have, which I’ve always believed in. We are playing the long game. There’s a sense of urgency. We mustn’t lose that sense of urgency. In the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game if we are to truly be that respected industry resource. I’m with you there. Identity is definitely part of it. Authority is a second-story mode that we delve into. Money is the third. They are the three key areas that I see that sales professionals probably sabotage themselves the most as far as those internal stories they’re telling themselves about the buyer or the deal
.
We mustn't lose our sense of urgency. But in the big scheme of things, we are playing the long game.
While we’re on that, before we go to the stories that we tell the buyers and the stories we elicit from the buyers, I love that part. If somebody is tuning in to this, what might be a tip or two that they can start to think about in addition to reading the book that might help in those areas? You said you’re seeing some salespeople sabotage themselves. What are some of the things you’re seeing or some of the things that our audience could maybe focus on in this category?
If I was with a salesperson now and we were having this conversation, I would go into coach mode. I would ask them to consider a couple of things. I wouldn’t necessarily tell them to do anything because you know that your audience at the moment, I would rather them contemplate a couple of thoughts. I would rather them think. The question would be, “How are you showing up in front of your buyer?”
Let’s get honest, what part of you needs to be expanded? There would be a part of you that has a belief about your role as a salesperson. Does that need to be expanded? Is there a part of you that resists prospecting? Is there a part of you that pushes back on holding margin? What is that part? How can that part maybe be reduced? There’s an exercise in the book that I’ll get people to go through, but it is looking at the different parts of us. We are almost schizophrenics. We’re made up of multiple parts.
It’s not just me.
No. I used to think it was just me, by the way. I would get them to answer themselves or think about that. Secondly, I would ask them to think about their beliefs around people in authority.
Tell us more about that.
If you were driving along the highway and you looked at your rear vision mirror and you heard a police car with lights flashing, what would you do?
Pull-over because it’s the police. I’d pull over because I’m assuming they’re coming after me.
It’s like, “What have I done wrong?” you’re pumping the brakes, looking at the seatbelt, and they just speed right past you. What is it about the fact that because they were police? We’ve grown up in an environment where we have to respect authority, whether it’s the teacher, the priest, or the police. You then grow up and there’s CEO written on a door. It doesn’t matter if that person is younger than you or not.
Nearly 25% of people have a fear of authority. You roll that out across the sales profession and we start to marry together the identity that some salespeople have that may not help them or serve them as much. Marry that with a fear of authority, and then add into that money beliefs. I think $100 is a lot of money, but I’m selling something for $100,000. How is that going to impact my ability to have those financial conversations? They are the three-story modes that I address so far as the internal stories that salespeople tell themselves. Not just salespeople, but business owners and sales leaders.
Let’s move on to the stories we tell buyers. What are the story modes we need to think of there?
There are a couple of different avenues to go here. 1) We mentioned traditional storytelling where you have your origin story, your signature story, or your connection story. It follows the hero’s journey, and there’s a method in its madness. A case study is different than a success story. A case study is all about you couched around a buyer. A success story is all about the buyer. We know that that is an important part of selling. That’s something that we also address. What I’ve done is I’ve taken it a step further and I’ve thought, “I want this book to shift and disrupt the way a salesperson thinks about telling stories.” When we think that 83% of our processing is done visually and 11% of our process is done auditorly, why don’t we try to capture a story visually?
This is thought leadership coming into it now. The ability for you to be sitting over a coffee with a prospect, listening, eliciting their stories, being able to capture, know how to capture, so this is very much a playbook as well, their story, and grab your pen and napkin. You hear that cliché all the time. “Grab a napkin and do a deal.”
We did a deal back at the napkin.
How can you do that and be able to capture and collaborate on what you are hearing? When you draw something, you are actually drawing someone in. When we think about the fact that as children, our first attempt at art was shapes, triangles, squares, and circles. Why would we not lean into that part of us as well and be able to collaborate? Charlie Munger says that you’ve got to be able to capture your ideas on a framework of mental models. What a mental model does, and we are talking here about a ladder, a 2x2 matrix, or a Venn diagram, is it helps decision-making. It simplifies the complex and it paints a picture. There’s a saying, “A picture paints a thousand words.” What I’ve done in the book, the three modes there are based around progression, tension, and integration. Let me break those down.
Progression. Every one of us wants to progress. We want growth whether it’s personal growth, professional or business growth, or whatever it may be. We’ve all seen Maslow’s hierarchy. We’ve all seen Dr. Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamic. They are examples of progression models. When you are able, you would pre-bake these so you would do your research and you would build these out beforehand because you know your target market. If you are wrong, it doesn’t matter because it’s an opportunity for discussion. You don’t have to do all three of these. You may choose to create a ladder or an aspirational hierarchical model and discuss the growth path for your buyer or for their business. Also, a ladder like Maslow’s hierarchy will always give us why change is important. That’s the why.
The second one, which is all around tension is how do we build intensity into the sales conversation. We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “What do I need to do?” If we look at any 2x2 matrix, the Eisenhower Matrix, time management, and Robert Kiyosaki’s, the labels or the quadrants have tension.
We want our buyers to be sitting on the edge of their seat. We want them to be thinking, “Okay, what do I need to do?”
We want to be able to build intensity into our sales conversations by telling and collaborating a story. A 2x2 is always a what. What do I need to do? When you get to that final top right-hand quadrant, it’s like, “That’s what I want.” In my conversion matrix in the book, it’s like, “I want to accelerate my team’s conversions. I want to build the conversions of my sales pipeline. How do I do that?” That naturally leads to a how.
A Venn diagram is always around how. A Venn diagram is all about how we integrate and how we articulate outcomes. What I’ve shared with you early on, the story selling circles, is my Venn diagram. I will sit with somebody and build it out with them because I’ve elicited their stories along the way. It’s a no-brainer. They then know, “You get me.” They are the three external stories that we tell our buyer using mental models.
You’ve got a well-identified ideal client profile and you focus as a business, you know what these are. Every time you have this conversation, you’re going to get better at it. You have more feedback and input because you’re learning every time you go through this. By the way, here’s something to double underline. Even if we’re slightly wrong with this point of view, it doesn’t matter. It’s this opportunity for discussion and engagement.
One of the tenets of true coaching is there is no right or wrong. When you can go to market with that whole belief system that, “It doesn’t matter what I put down. It doesn’t matter what I suggest. There’s no right or wrong. It’s simply my perception. The buyer will always have their own perception.” When you can collaborate, clarify, be on the same side of the table, and be comfortable and congruent in saying, “I might’ve got this wrong. Let’s talk about that.” You are going to get gold out of that because they are going to know that whole know, like, and trust component is off the charts.
It aligns with so much basic common sense. That’s where a lot of this heads. We’re in for a common sense revolution. Professional sales is coming.
I totally agree.
It leads to I’m not pitching anything except your wisdom. We have knowledge and insight where we’re going to teach them something different, perhaps they haven’t seen before or prompt that discussion. This is where you get your elevating that trust and credibility and all those kinds of good things. All of the walls drop when you’re in this conversation. It’s a different level.
It totally is. When you get it, you can play with it, you can try it on, and you’ll get blisters like a new pair of shoes, that’s okay. They will eventually become such a comfortable conversation. Another vehicle to get there is that third root cause. That is not being able to elicit their stories the correct way. Leaning into the coach approach is how you can elicit those essential stories. When you have this whole coach approach, they do all the talking because you know what you’re doing, you know the questions that you’re asking, and you know why you’re asking them. If we flip into those three-story modes, it’s about expansion, perspective, and decision.
We want to be able to build flexibility into our conversations which is, “How do we expand? What’s the expansion? How do we elicit the stories through showing that flexibility?” As a sales professional and a sales leader, we have to now even, more so than ever, to communicate with so many different levels within an organization. The choke-hold that I’m seeing with businesses out there is that we still talk about, “Don’t talk brochure talk.” You build in this fear of authority and all of this other stuff. You’re finding salespeople will take the path of least resistance, which is going to the level that they’re comfortable talking to.
What are those conversations we have that enable us to move between C-level contextual conversations, operational conceptual conversations, and user-based content conversations? It’s bringing in this flexibility. The person who is able to have the conversation with every level will own the business. I teach how to do that.
It’s great the way you’ve simplified this approach. It’s very much clean set of eyes on some things that have been age-old prophecies as you point out in the book. I think you quote Aristotle about communication. The last point you referenced when you’re dealing with different people in the organization and they have dramatically different personal and professional needs and wants. That goes back to the wonderful days when I had hair in 1991 with strategic selling, frankly. I think it’s actually earlier. It was even fifteen years before me. It was like the ‘80s. That’s where they came up with the buyers. That has not changed in 40 or 50 years. The fact that we have to understand the different folks involved.
There’s a lot of talk now about the buying groups increased. No, it hasn’t, for anything material. If you were selling a widget for $50 or $5,000, maybe there was one person. If you were doing an enterprise software deal or a large outsourcing deal, there were fifteen people involved in that. It was always multiple buyers for anything material. They always had difficulty coming to consensus. You were trying to provide thought leadership and guidance. The main difference would be they did have to take some of their information from you at phase value because they didn’t have access to the global encyclopedia of everything that’s happened up until 2021 through ChatGPT.
Yes, exactly. Even out there at the moment, within enterprise sales organizations, there are still territories that don’t necessarily sell to enterprise. That may be the component of that particular global company or a big company, but the sales team may still be selling to SMB. They still do have that one point of contact. It could be that the salesperson is dealing with the CEO of an SMB, but they’re still talking at the user level. It can be, “My salesperson who only has legal firms or small family manufacturing company, how can I take that particular salesperson and up their ability to be able to have a C-level conversation with that one particular buyer?” It goes across both enterprise sales, where you do have multiple stakeholders and the SMB space as well.
I’m trying to connect some dots and this would be opinion, not fact because I love your research-based approach to this and it certainly aligns with our approach in the funnel. One of the things we are noticing is the increase in mental health issues with professional salespeople. Generally, they’re not happy. One of the things you’ve talked about here is many professional salespeople have this comfort level dealing at certain very tactical levels like users.
For you or me selling to a user is actually at times unpleasant because they’re sitting, they’re used to a demo, they can’t say yes, they can only say no, they’re not strategic, they’re trying to get through every day and maybe worry about what went wrong yesterday. If salespeople want to default to only doing that, then they default to pitching because they’re not getting strategic conversations from typical users. This whole thing is no fun.
My mind is going from a couple of different directions here because I’m thinking, “How do they elevate their connection and make contact?” You think about email as completely spam. A voicemail is an unknown number. LinkedIn is completely spam. There are apps and stuff that you can short-circuit. How do you make contact? That is the frustrating part for all of us. You get a lot of gurus out there talking about the prospecting but they’re not doing it anyway.
How do we make contact with the right person to start with? That’s a question and it comes back to the old days when it was direct mail. Is networking making a comeback? There are all of these different avenues, but that salesperson who’s stuck with the user, their hands are tied for a couple of reasons. Their leadership team won’t bring people in to elevate the learning because in some instances, that leader doesn’t want to be show up for not knowing what to do. It’s a catch-22. I’m with you there. The salespeople need support internally and it’s got to come from all levels. It’s got to be a conversation that has to be had.
We have this conversation on this show that is great, by the way. You and I are going to talk for two hours offline from this show. How do you do that now? Our belief is the automated and the spam is garbage. It’s wasting everybody’s time. There was a time you and I will remember when you and I got 30 voicemails a day. We had days and times when our voicemail could fill out even if we were working. Now, I get 2 or 3 voicemails a day.
If you want to reach me, first of all, it’s got to be a multi-channel approach, but call me. Secondly, do ten minutes of research on me, my business, and my industry. I’m listed as the CEO of In The Funnel. Whether that’s the right or wrong thing, I am. We do get hit 30 times a week. At least five times a week, we get hit by a sales training company that says, “Do you want to improve the way your sales team is selling?” We are a sales training team. If anybody had ever gone to our website, they’d go to a video that tells them how to do demand generation.
We talk about this and all they’d have to do in a voicemail to me and say, “Let me see if your In The Funnel practices work. I noticed that you’ve got three levels of social media. We help with the fourth. This is an opportunity. I love the video you put on YouTube talking about A, B, and C.” I am morally and ethically compelled to respond to that voicemail. It’s so painfully easy. What’s happening in professional sales now is what we want to do is say, “I made 100 calls and I didn’t get any live conversations. Why don’t I try and email blast 300 people tomorrow and we keep doing more of what’s not working?”
We just keep doing more of what's not working.
That’s what I’m saying. Somebody is leading that practice.
The other point you bring on, and I have a lot of empathy for them, you talked about sales leaders aren’t feeling comfortable to bring in somebody from the outside world to coach their team. Folks who tune in to our show have heard me rant on this many a time. The best performers in the world have multiple coaches. The top performers of the world or most successful entrepreneurs in the world are part of either Strategic Coach, Gazelles, or EOS. The best athletes in the world have nine coaches.
It comes back to ego and identity. Everything swings back to the internal stories. It’s a complete circle. I’m going off on a different tangent here. It’s like as I’m going back to that final circle, I talked about building and showing flexibility where we were talking about the CEO. The next story mode, which dovetails into what we were talking about then is based on perspective. That is all about, “How do we identify criteria?” We know the cliché. We all buy unlogged emotion and we back it up with logic. We need a bit of logic before it goes into the emotional, and then it swings back to logic again.
This is using the coach approach. Being able to identify is being able to go from the shallow. If you do picture the iceberg, most salespeople and sales leaders are playing in the shallows. They’re understanding outcomes. Everybody understands outcomes and what a buyer or a sales team member needs. What is it that they don’t want? That’s another question to ask. As you go deeper under the iceberg, being able to elicit those states that are at the value of that particular buyer, their business, or your sales team.
What is important to that salesperson or what is important to that buyer at a personal level? Also, understanding what comes next further under the iceberg is, if growth or profitability is important to your buyer or if support is important to your team member or salesperson, what must have to happen in their eyes to achieve that? We all make assumptions and we think, “Someone says they want support.” “Every Monday morning, come in and have a meeting with me and I’ll go.” “The buyer wants profitability.” “We’ll do X, Y, and Z.” That’s not what they mean. We have to identify the criteria further.
The final story mode is decision. That is, land the business. When we think about decision, it’s all about, “Who makes the decision? Who else apart from yourself? When is a decision going to be made? What’s the process for the decision?” That’s all external. We need to tap into the decision drivers of our buyer. That is at a deeper level as well. Once you identify what those drivers are, then your conversation shifts again. The same applies for the sales leader with the team.
It’s so important. Frankly, if you’ve been doing this a while, it’s so obvious, but it’s not being done. I think there’s multiple reasons for it, but any sales leader tuning in to this show, in the next time you’re having a collaborative discussion with one of your teammates on a deal status and an update, deal strategy, when you say, “Tell me what’s important to this person.” Your salesperson’s response says, “Obviously, they want to do this and this. It’s not obvious unless the buyer told me it. It’s not my assumption.” What did they specifically say and why?
That’s the stories we’ve got to elicit. They are the stories that are so often missed. It’s like having a three-legged stool here. The stool has only got two legs or the stool has only got one. The third leg is what’s missing as well. That’s going to make a rock-solid deal.
One of the things we’ve found, and maybe you can confirm from your perspective, we see many salespeople are afraid to ask that question about what might get in the way of moving forward or what are you worried about. It’s because they think that if I ask the question, I’m going to give the buyer a reason not to move forward. When the reality of it is in this day and age, that buyer has got fifteen reasons for not moving forward that is literally keeping them awake at night. Why not have a conversation about that?
You mentioned Jeb Blount earlier. I spoke at OutBound Conference. I put this up on the main stage screen and used it as an example. When a buyer does give us old term or an objection, I don’t like that word, they’re sharing some concerns with us. What we do instinctively is we justify. Immediately, we go into justification mode. We try to sell. What we need to do is we need to elicit the story behind that consumer. It’s like, “We are a little bit too expensive or our delivery is not on point.” What has happened to make you think that way? That’s giving us data and it’s giving us the story behind the story. Now we can acknowledge that and we can respond with a story of another client who had a similar thought process. It expands the conversation. It’s collaborative, and then we could move on.
You’re absolutely right. However we term it, we need to understand it and that’s part of the collaboration. In fact, for those of us who used to do material deals or very significant deals, one of the things that would happen from a client’s side would be both parties would be working from one business case. At that level of deal went to a multi-hundred million dollar deal. There’s no our perspective in your perspective. There’s our collective perspective. Let’s agree on what we all think is going to happen. That’s what you’re going to use to take up the channel and so forth. Once we’re aligned and we agree, then we negotiate, “How do we split the value?” They’re not afraid to do what’s right for their business, and then I have to be comfortable doing what’s right for my business.
We’re at least aligned on what we believe the facts are. These things are difficult to come to the end game but then we’re having this real conversation about the important points. We’re not coming from two different places. In that way, we know what happens if we get to an impasse and we have this real decision to make. People aren’t going quiet on you. They don’t stop returning calls. They don’t give you a pretend reason or the political reason they didn’t move forward. They actually tell the truth. I’m not prepared to jeopardize, “We’re doing this over here.” I’m not prepared to jeopardize that with this new initiative. It’s going to take some of the same IT resources and some of the same business resources. I don’t think I’ve got the capacity to do it.
That comes back to the risk factor has nothing to do with before signing the order. It’s what happens after the order is signed. That’s where the risk factor is. In the book, I talk about the cost of inaction, the cost of the problem, and all these different costs because that has to come into the conversation as well. That’s way back in the beginning as part of your collaborative understanding. We talked discovery but it is that professional conversation that is business. It’s a business conversation.
All of these conversations are far more fun than pitching a product to a user, and then hoping that user somehow can magically sell your product because you couldn’t. Now you’re hoping they can take it up. Bernadette, I have to be very cautious of your time. I can’t believe the amount of time we’ve spent talking and how fast this has gone for me. What an absolute pleasure speaking with you. Personally, I’ve received enormous value from this conversation. I am darn sure that the people tuning in to this show have as well. First of all, thank you so much for joining.
My pleasure. It’s been fun.
If people want to learn more about you, which they inevitably will, what’s the best way to do so?
Please join me on LinkedIn and mention that you heard me on the show. That would be awesome for Mark as well. My book SHIFT and DISRUPT, it’s on Amazon now. If you are a sales leader and you have a team, go to ShiftAndDisrupt.com because there are bonuses there for sales leaders. I’m also running a webinar, so if you’re on LinkedIn with me, you’ll see the webinar coming up where I’ll be running through this. Those are a few channels.
Please make sure we’re on the list of invitees for that webinar. We’re going to share that with our network as well. They’re going to get lots of value from that.
Thank you.
When you’re thinking about your next keynotes, you’re probably planning for next year in the not-too-distant future, please check out Bernadette’s website because she’s done keynotes for some of the top organizations in the world. Some of the top thought leaders in sales have actually engaged Bernadette to come and do those keynotes. Thank you so much, Bernadette.
My pleasure. It’s been awesome.
Sure has. Thank you, team, for joining. As always, we run the show to try and elevate the performance and professionalism of B2B sales. In doing so, we want to improve the lives of professional salespeople. We hope that you’ve enjoyed this show. If you do, by the way, please like and subscribe to the show because that’s helpful to us. Thank you for that. If there are ways that we can improve this show, I’d love to hear your ideas. My email is MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. That’s my personal email that I check. If you give us some constructive criticism, I am personally going to respond to that email. We love constructive criticism. The more direct, the better. It’s faster. We love it. Thank you for doing that. We’ll see everybody next time.
Important Links
SHIFT and DISRUPT: Stop Selling Widgets. Start Selling Wisdom
LinkedIn – Bernadette McClelland
About Bernadette McClelland
Bernadette McClelland: CEO – Sales Leaders Global LLC and Influential Speaker on Disruption and Business Growth
Australian, Female, Pragmatic, Inspirational, Compelling, Real!
Bernadette McClelland is a foremost expert in Sales Leadership and Transformation Strategy. With a dynamic career that encompasses an executive role in Corporate Australia, entrepreneurial ventures, and business ownership, she is a beacon in this new Wisdom Economy. Internationally acclaimed, she's viewed as in the top 1% of sales leaders globally by the US Government, among the Top 50 global speakers and honored as one of the Top 35 Most Influential Women in Sales.
Her accolades include coaching Harvard MBA students, mentor for Colorado’s Global Landing Pad, partnerships with industry luminaries like Anthony Robbins, and endorsements from renowned author Brian Tracey. With a legacy that spans from New York City to New Delhi, Bernadette's profound insights and practical strategies offer franchise owners and sales leaders an unmatched perspective for thriving in today's business landscape.