Welcome to SALES with ASLAN, a weekly podcast hosted by ASLAN Co-founders Tom Stanfill and Tab Norris, geared at helping sales professionals and sales leaders eliminate the hard sell. At the end of the day, we believe that selling is serving. ASLAN helps sellers make the shift from a ‘typical’ sales approach, to one that makes us more influential because we embrace the truth that the customer’s receptivity is more important than your value prop or message.
The goal of these interviews is to spotlight various experts in the world of sales and sales leadership – sharing informational stories, techniques, and expert interviews on the sales topics you care about.
The following are notes from Ep. 140 – How to Navigate Selling a Total Solution
In this episode, Jason Smith joins Tom Stanfill to discuss how sellers often get very comfortable selling just a couple of products from their portfolio, and customers become interested in only those few products. With his extensive sales experience, Jason shares his insights on how sellers can move from selling a single hot product, to selling a total opportunity and complete solution.
Listen to the conversation here:
Or check out the full transcript below.
Resources:
- Find Jason Smith on LinkedIn
Transcript:
00:13
Tom Stanfill
Welcome to another episode of SALES with ASLAN. I’m here with one of our top ranking senior stars at ASLAN training, Jason Smith. He’s one of our consultants and wanted to have him on the show. Cause were hanging out today and talking about something I think would be very relevant to a lot of our listeners. Before we dive into that, let’s just let’s let’s say hi to Jason. How you doing Jason?
00:43
Jason Smith
Hi, Jason is doing fantastic. If I was doing any better, I’d have to take something for it.
00:50
Tom Stanfill
I’m glad. Well, if I know Tab, he can’t be mad at you for filling in…
00:56
Jason Smith
It’s his fault for being away, right?
00:58
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. Well Tab is a, he’s actually at West Point, his second son, his second son to graduate from West Point. That’s pretty cool. So he’s there. So I appreciate you. I appreciate you stopping by the studio and hanging out with me today.
01:14
Jason Smith
No worries. This, the part of the show was to shoot shots at West Point, since I went to the Airforce Academy,
01:21
Tom Stanfill
You can’t, you can’t do that.
You can’t give West Point a hard time… Tab wouldn’t like that.
01:28
Jason Smith
He wouldn’t like that.
01:28
Tom Stanfill
Okay. Especially since he’s had a delivery, I’m sure. I’m sure the Naval academy is just as prestigious.
01:38
Jason Smith
Yes. Yes. Just as procedures as west point, but we’ll work on the air force academy status. They’re working on that.
01:46
Tom Stanfill
I don’t know much about all I know is that I couldn’t get into any of those schools or any division of the bill. I probably wouldn’t get into the divisions of the military, but I don’t think I could get into any of those schools. The topic today, which I was really excited to talk to you about because of your specific experience at IBM as were kind of chatting in our lobby area about your experience selling or working with an organization that had, what did you tell me? 10,000 SKU,
02:18
Jason Smith
10,000 skews. Yeah. And IBM I was yeah. Carrying a large portfolio of products.
02:25
Tom Stanfill
Your one that, you worked in a specific division and a large portfolio of products, and one of the challenges that we constantly see when we work with organizations is that, sellers get very comfortable selling a couple of products. Also customers are really interested in a couple of products. There they struggle with how do I move from selling a product that may be hot product that I understand or product that’s in demand to selling, to transitioning, selling a total opportunity, telling a large solution and how do I navigate that? I think you, as we, learned when I first met you were very successful at selling a solution. I wanted to have you on the show to talk about how you transitioned. So, so give us a little background on your experience of, what was happening when you started at IBM and how did you, how do you make that transition and ultimately become a star and then move into ultimately now where you’re consulting and training sales organizations all over the world.
03:29
Tom Stanfill
You just got back from Greece last week, right?
03:31
Jason Smith
Just got back from Greece, fantastic team, a large sales organization. What I dealt with early in my career is similar to what a lot of our Atlanta clients have been dealing with over the years, which is a very huge portfolio and a very large branded organization. We’ve trained at HP for some time and you’ve got hundreds of reps with thousands of products and it’s a challenge to kind of get narrowed down. To your point, about my background, I came into IBM after leaving the military on an inside sales team that had responsibility for the entire middleware portfolio all around these very midterm mid-sized companies, about 20 million to 250, maybe half a billion, that’s mid market.
04:24
Tom Stanfill
Yeah.
04:26
Jason Smith
And the challenge.
04:27
Tom Stanfill
Is a lot of those companies,
04:29
Jason Smith
A lot of those companies, tons of big territories, hundreds and hundreds of reps and lots of products. Right. That’s what I found myself pretty much my second role in sales after leaving the military. So it was a tough start.
04:42
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. You knew you had a good work ethic. You knew how to get things done, but this was a completely different role. What was initially, what was your challenge?
04:54
Jason Smith
The biggest thing was that insight sales team, even though were full service reps, this wasn’t that mid tier lead generation rep, we had to take opportunities all the way to close. We were full fledged reps just inside. The challenge was trying to take these very broad based products in the middleware portfolio. Just to let you know what middleware is. You think about your software, it environment, right? You got the hardware, your hardware is one tier of your it environment, the big applications that sit behind and run things. You’ve got the stuff that everybody touches, right. Your CRM system is the software user tier. Right. And middleware is the plumbing in between.
05:44
Tom Stanfill
Right.
05:45
Jason Smith
So we’ll try to sell up.
05:46
Tom Stanfill
Thanks. Talk to each other, how it works. Okay. So you sold middleware,
05:53
Jason Smith
Correct. And there was a level team.
05:56
Tom Stanfill
There was like 10,000 products that you could sell related to that were all relevant to middleware.
06:02
Jason Smith
Yes. Yes. And to their credit. IBM was very good about training people and aligning people with processes and technical information, but it was a very transactional model. They wanted us to hit the phones and link up with a lot of these existing IBM clients to offer them solutions that they had no conception of. They didn’t have an idea of what these products could do for their business. It was very hard to be transactional.
06:32
Tom Stanfill
You were coming in and saying we have these. I mean, it was it, did you create the lead or did the lead come in? I mean, did how did you start the conversation? I mean, so what was the key to being successful in that role? Cause I could imagine they’re like they don’t even, maybe not even knew they had a problem that all,
06:56
Jason Smith
I like the way you phrase that what was the key to being successful because what were traditionally taught as to how to go about it was different than what was the key to being successful. They wanted us to be very direct transactional with a mix of business. The leads would come from existing opportunities that had already been there. When I arrived, I was one of 600,000 people. A lot of these opportunities were in the pipeline for some time that it started from either online inquiries or some previous outbound sales team had reached out and started an opportunity hadn’t gone anywhere, but there was something there. That was probably about 50% of the leads that were there for me. The rest I had to generate myself by going out to Greenfield companies that couldn’t spell IBM and trying to find new business,
07:55
Tom Stanfill
You.
07:55
Jason Smith
Would think.
07:56
Tom Stanfill
It didn’t help you, that you were with IBM and you could call any company and they would open the door and talk to you.
08:04
Jason Smith
That helped a lot. Actually the thing is that a lot of people who start off in these large companies, they have the benefit of that trusted brand. Getting meetings and getting opportunities is not the problem, right? It’s progressing the opportunities and getting the individuals you talk to see the value in what that product is going to do for them. Especially when there’s so many IBM products that are competing for attention in the same account, you have to make your particular product stand out and get them to act now. That came down to value and that value usually wasn’t there as some product, it had to be in the vision that they have for what the product could do. I had to learn that they didn’t teach that I had to learn how to find the value in that vision. That’s the only way I could be successful.
08:53
Jason Smith
All.
08:53
Tom Stanfill
Right. Let me make sure I understand. You’re kind of, if you just think about a specific product or trying to lead with a specific product, it didn’t go well. Cause there’s so many different things they’re doing and looking at it and they didn’t understand it. You were trying to sell more a vision or the, what you said, the value of the vision, what you could do for them. How so basically what I’m hearing you say shift from selling some specific product, which is what they were telling you to do. If you’re going to go out and really hit your number and you’ve got at least 50% of the people you’re going after, they don’t have any, you don’t have any relationship with 50%, they’ve got some relationship, which you could leverage. Let’s talk about the people that you could get in the door, but they really didn’t know what you could do for them.
09:42
Tom Stanfill
You could leverage the IBM name, which a lot of people can’t, but you get in the door. What, how would you get them to ultimately buy into this vision of what you could do for them?
09:54
Jason Smith
Yeah, well, it started from understanding them. For me, when we first got there, were taught and trained to start to focus on the product. I think that’s where most sales methodologies or sales processes began is, Hey, go in and pitch the product and get someone to say, I’d like this product and move forward.
10:17
Tom Stanfill
I understand it’s easy. Let’s just narrow it down to a product that’s really popular or hot and build a campaign around that and talk about the product, which is a good way to get in the door sometimes, but may not be the best way to really hit your number.
10:31
Jason Smith
No, very tough. Well, a lot of people did hit their number by going after one hot product. The thing is that anything that’s hot cools off after awhile, even a brand, right? The IBM name might not be as popular one season to the next. If you don’t have the ability to go in and generate interest with those people who have no conception of what you can do or why your brand or that product is valuable, you’re at square one and you have to have a certain set of skills. That’s where I had to learn. I struggled at first with stop focusing on the product, start with a person and what problem they’re trying to solve. Once you get done with that problem, it comes down to all right, here’s the problem now? What does your world look like if you solved it? That’s that next step?
11:17
Jason Smith
Yeah. There was.
11:18
Tom Stanfill
About that because I think a lot of people skip over that. I think a lot of times when people uncover a problem, it’s kind of a specific business problem and I’m like, okay, got it. You want to replace your roof or you need to improve blah, blah. You’re talking about going deeper than just a business, maybe a business problem or a specific problem that the product.
11:42
Jason Smith
Yeah, well, absolutely. I’m speaking in this case to those sellers or those product teams whose offerings are not so straightforward as just a, Hey, you got a nail that needs driven. Here’s a hammer, right? Very clear for people to see that. If you have a service, some level of expertise or you have a certain kind of product that my case without doing technical and explain a middleware again, right. If you would come into someone’s home and try to sell the plumbing inside that house, and you want to replace the plumbing or Southern new technology and plumbing, the house already has pipes. It already has plumbing. It already does something. Right. If you’ve got something that does that same thing marginally better, it’s not about explaining that difference. It’s about, well, what does your life look like around that? That’s where most sellers who have to sell a total solution or a project level solution, they fall down on getting out of that product mindset, right?
12:42
Jason Smith
They keep going back to, well, it’s got a widget. It does this, that doesn’t really translate to that movement for the customer to do something with it. And that’s where I struggled at first.
12:52
Tom Stanfill
So, so you, you love what, you’re, how you’re describing that so that they’ve got, they need, you’re going to talk about the plumbing, which may not be, it may not be a perceived problem, right? If they know they’ve got us, the sink that’s clogged, you can talk about whatever product fixes that. If they’re like, I don’t know, it’s plumbing, it’s working. My software is working. My hardware is working. Middlewares where, so you got a, so how do you get them to see the value of something when there is no perceived value,
13:20
Jason Smith
Right? Again, this goes back to people who are getting through their day without your expertise.
13:26
Tom Stanfill
They’re getting.
13:27
Jason Smith
Through your day without your help. They’re limping along and they know it’s kind of painful, but I’m making money. Things are working. That’s how it was for me. And these technical software sales. I’m going into a team. That’s got, hundreds of products, technology solutions that are operating already, but I’ve got some marginal improvement, right? What I’d have to do is first through the, a ability to just use the IBM brand, Hey, I might be able to call him. They would take the call. The first thing we had to do was really talk about that person’s world and make the conversations different. We were trying to talk about, Hey, you’re trying to buy this widget. Let’s talk about the widget. I learned through a bit of trial and error. The first thing you got to start with is what are they dealing with? What does their world look like now?
14:13
Jason Smith
Which surprisingly you’ve probably seen this time. A lot of people don’t really know what their current state is. They don’t really recognize where the pain is. Are you, have you seen that in your space as well?
14:23
Tom Stanfill
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I think of it always as a bridge, it’s like they have a current state. It’s always true. I mean, there’s a certain place that maybe they haven’t thought about the current state related to their desired future state, but where are they now? Where do they want to be? What’s the bridge they’re trying to build to get there. Everybody wants something. I always want to know, where are they now? What do they want and why do they want it? If I, if that becomes something, if I can help them get there and I can offer something, they can’t get internally. Now there’s a reason to continue the conversation.
14:58
Jason Smith
And that was it. That reason, we say reason, the word that I came up with and what I learned over time was why. Right. I fix it because most of the time they didn’t really know exactly how bad the problem was to start with. They didn’t know that there was any opportunity there to be gained. So first we started with them. You started with the person and the problem. Once you analyze what that problem was with them doing a lot of the stuff that I didn’t even know at the time, it was asthma, unrelated, working on things that we teach about focusing on their needs. First we call it other centered, right? That would give them that openness, we call it receptivity that rapport that they will want to tell me about what the problem is. Now I can start to build a case for all right.
15:44
Jason Smith
Well, where are you trying to go? After we get clear on that and we understood what the problem is. Now I could go back to all these 10,000 skews and build some solution for them, which actually there’s a point there when you talk about building solutions, it’s kind of levels you got to think about, right? A lot of times there’s a product level solution. I like the hammer idea, right? You want to drive a nail, a hammer, grab a hammer and smash it easy. Right? You can sell as many hammers as you want for $2, right? Make a million dollars. How many hammers do you have to sell? If you can help them kind of look at the bigger picture, right? You can now move up to practice. Through that rapport, you get talking about their world and their future state. You can amplify that and say, what if you had, some pneumatic solution that could drive nails without the need of a hammer.
16:39
Jason Smith
Now how many more projects cause you do, you’re expanding the scope and that’s good because now you’ve, up-sized every individual opportunity and you’ve made everything you’re presenting much more impactful for the business, right? So in my case of middleware, right? Plumbing, right? Selling plumbing, no one really cares about the pipes that lead it. There. They think about the faucet, the end results, right? If you want to take it up a level to, well, what if you have multiple faucets, you need more water pressure. Now we’re talking about a solution. That’s a project that involves lots of different things and that’s more valuable to that end user. That was the first thing to figure out what level of solution you want it to calculate for this?
17:23
Tom Stanfill
I think I understand. I’m also understanding that’s a, there’s a risk there. And w what I’m hearing you.
17:29
Jason Smith
Say,
17:31
Tom Stanfill
I’m hearing you say that there’s like the using the hammer level hammer versus the pneumatic, or, fixing a pipe or offering a pipe versus water pressure for all the sinks. All of a sudden the deal gets bigger. It gets more expensive and you have to decide, do I want to sell the one thing or do I want to sell the big thing versus the big thing? Because you can lose people if you go after the total solution versus the thing that they’re most interested in, how do you make that decision?
18:06
Jason Smith
Can I be honest with you? I actually struggled with that early on. I really did. I had some individuals that said, we’ve been talking about this legit. We’re not quite sure. In an effort to help them see the value of the product solution, you start this project level or enterprise business level conversation. Well, here’s the reason why you need one hammer because your team of people could now all swing their hammers in unison, and to swing hammers in unison, you got to have a metronome that synchronizes the strokes of the hammer. Once you do that, you need a person to manage that. But we have that too. Now they’ve fallen in love with this bigger conception of this enterprise wide big product solution. They can’t see the value in this product that you want to help drive in the next week, month, quarter. Right? What would you say?
19:02
Jason Smith
The confused mind does nothing, right? We’re always fighting the status quo. You always want to simplify, simplify as much as possible so that people feel it’s easy to take a step that the next step seems familiar and to enhance this ability that I had to develop to create solutions. The next thing I had to do after we decide which level of solution and engineer one in our mind before presenting it back, you got to know enough about the customer to translate it down, to dial it down to very familiar terms. Okay. Great example. We’ve been talking about middleware, right? Kind of an abstract technology concept. We talk about it as plumbing, just so you can get the idea so you can hold all that. Right. That’s.
19:55
Tom Stanfill
You’re taking something that I’m not familiar with, and you’re connected to something that I am familiar with.
20:00
Jason Smith
Right? Right. Which again, given the larger size of the, the deals that I was doing, I could go away and come back and do this. Even in real time, as you’re talking to someone in the moment, you got to understand it well enough so that if you have to do that translation and simplify it to some a word picture, write a simple phrase that can use, like, it’s like plumbing, simple, short phrase, you’ve got to have a deep knowledge of whatever you’re dealing with in that customer’s world to kind of translate it back. Especially if the person individually, if they’re into basketball, you use a basketball analogy, right? Oh, it’s kinda like, the, football and it’s like the combine, we’re letting everybody see the results before they hire someone else. That’s it. I had to build that scale before I even knew that was something that Azlan taught.
20:50
Jason Smith
We teach about it in the concept of building value, right? Rather than just presenting a product, you want to use these familiar terms to build familiar value. They can get their arms around. Especially in the IBM world, most of the time you’re selling to these conglomerate decision makers, right? These groups of people that are buying back committee. The person you spoke to has got to carry it forward. They can’t say microprocessor transaction, flux, capacitor, but they can say, they can’t do all of that.
21:24
Tom Stanfill
Right.
21:25
Jason Smith
But they can talk about plumbing. For example, were doing a monitoring solution. Imagine this data center, right. All the different applications in this one big data center. Right. There was a solution that did all these monitoring, BBB beeps, let you know whenever anything was going off. They all these alerts problems. Yeah. That, you know, simple to understand. The person that has to manage that is busy, running around, chasing all these things, trying to keep track of it to the point where they get so many alerts that it’s like, I don’t care. They start to miss those critical connections between this alert. This alert knows this. One’s going to go.
22:06
Tom Stanfill
Off.
22:06
Jason Smith
Just.
22:07
Tom Stanfill
Sorry. Correct.
22:09
Jason Smith
How do you explain that in simple terms? Well, I got down to the analogy of, it looks like you’re chasing chickens, hurting cats. Now I’ve never heard of cats. I’ve never tasted chicken. That’s been people on the phone with this property chasing and chasing chickens. And.
22:27
Tom Stanfill
We’ve all seen Rocky. We’ve.
22:28
Jason Smith
All seen Rocky, right? Yeah. People get it, people get it. We say chasing chickens. What happened is when I was talking to the customer, I was like, look, you’re chasing chickens and that’s got to suck. Right. That little bit, you could see his whole expression change. You went from kind of listening to me, intently, and he kind of went. Yeah. Suddenly that familiarity brought his whole world and perspective and his shoulders relaxed and selling. He was like, I get it. Now I’m tired of chasing chickens. That phrase chasing chickens was now his, his heuristic to carry that pain point to the other people in the group. Listen, man, we’re tired of chasing chickens here, boss, you should hear Jason from IBM. He’s going to help us stop chasing chickens. As soon as they said it, they were like, yeah, I get that chasing chickens. So those.
23:17
Tom Stanfill
Emotional component to that because we’re tired, we’re frustrated. It’s not just this, not just to, you’re saving money, voiding some risk or, whatever the financial benefit of the data center, breaking down or, whatever problems it’s alerting you to, you start to, you can now connect to the pain of every day. We’re chasing how annoying, how frustrating.
23:47
Jason Smith
It’s funny. You mentioned that, right? Cause when you think about it, there’s a lot of solutions out there that some of the listeners are providing, offering that don’t really have metrics that they drive, that most of their customers already know that frustration we’ll talk about. Most people don’t have a dashboard that tracks data center, engineer frustration. They don’t tracking that. Right. It doesn’t show up on their annual reports. The CEO is not talking about reducing that number. If we know our customers really well, we understand what that particular pain translates to, how it connects. Right? All of these environments that everybody operates in real life is complex. It’s not complicated, right? A little push over here causes unexpected results over there. Here’s another word picture for you. It’s instead of a clock where every little piece is rigid, you move something here, exactly what’s going to happen over there, but in a person’s world, that complexity is more like a body system or an ecosystem where unexpected the results come from small change for over there.
25:11
Jason Smith
Of pollution over here is going to cause a lot of problems down the road. People aren’t tracking that. If you can get someone to understand something that you’re driving, some solution that provides those kinds of metrics, those unseen intangibles, you have to make them so familiar. They become tangible. It’s the language you use to describe it. That makes that difference. Right? That makes.
25:36
Tom Stanfill
Perfect.
25:36
Jason Smith
It’s the language you use that makes the intangible or not yet tangible. They’re not tracking it. They don’t know as painful because they didn’t count it. You got to use a language that makes it very familiar first. Then they’ll go looking for it. Then you work with them to quantify.
25:50
Tom Stanfill
What I’m hearing you say. And I think it’s so agree. It, there’s this which I think everybody defaults to is making, communicating the financial benefits in a tangible way. It’s like if you buy this system, it’s going to give you X and here’s a use case or case study or, ROI or cost of ownership or whatever. We just like a financial mathematical equation, which is important. We need to do that. I actually think what you’re talking about is getting people to emotionally experience the benefit and to feel it. Being able to really dive deep in what you said at the beginning, which is really understand what they want and why do they want it and what are they trying to accomplish, which may not have anything to do with a specific product. Right? It’s like, let’s just tell me about your world. Let’s not talk about a product.
26:39
Tom Stanfill
Let’s talk about what are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish? How are you at the end of the year? How are you going to have a, and you’ve had a good quarter, bad quarter, good year, bad year. What is it that you want and why do you want it? And what’s your plan to get there. If you can bring value to that, great. You’re also able to tap into the emotional drivers of the decision making process and be able to, now you’re saying I can address that by word pictures, analogy tapping into that language because that’s ultimately emotions drive decision making.
27:14
Jason Smith
They do, they do. I mean, even when you think about how logically based these decisions seem, the desire to make the right choice that drive these logical loops that people jump through in order to get to the right technical decision is driven by some emotion. They want to look good in front of their boss. They want to make sure that they don’t let down their stakeholders. Someone wants to get promoted, or somehow they just have this desire to have the most cutting edge. What, something is there, that’s emotional for that.
27:50
Tom Stanfill
Even saving money. The emotion is what is the money by you? You’re you want the money to have the emotion associated with what the money gives you. It gives you security, or it gives you a combined, something that makes you feel I would buy by analogy is always a car. If we made a purely financial decisions, that’s what really drove everybody. We driving the same car. Cause there is a car that is the most economic car to buy. Now you could argue that, well, there may be three cars, one for, carrying things, one for families and one for, single, people are small families or just two people, whatever minutes, sedan, SUV, and truck, that’s it. I mean, there’s, there’s and then we’d all have one guard like, well that’s the one that wins. It’s the most economical, but that’s not the way it works. We all want our specific unique thing that represents us, which is an emotion.
28:44
Jason Smith
Exactly. I look too good in my green beetle. That’s exactly what I want to drive.
28:48
Tom Stanfill
Around it. The flowers I love.
28:50
Jason Smith
Exactly that. Yeah. That’s the only thing I want to be seen in. Yeah. Nah, you make a huge point there and you talk about that. Emotion is the emotion that drives the desire to quantify those currently intangible metrics, right? How painful is it to chase those chickens? Right? It’s the emotion behind that goes to the investigation to help people quantify the financial benefits. We say this all the time that people make decisions on emotion first and use logic afterwards. So that goes to the third step. The skills, my three skills that I had to learn was now working with the person that got that emotional vision right now we have to value that vision. We have to quantify the value of that vision. Once they believe in I’m sick of chasing chickens, now they have to act, they need the logic on top of that emotion.
29:49
Jason Smith
I’m tired of chasing chickens. I don’t like it. This is impacting me personally. Or let’s go the other way. Right? We’re talking pain. Let’s talk about carrot. No stick. Let’s talk about carrot. We can see. This is where I, this is why I would lose people. I would cast these beautiful visions of what the future of the business could be. I can, up-size the multiple millions they could make in the feature right now. That’s what they want. They want that thing. We go down the path of trying to build this bigger solution. Can’t really focus on the small piece. They got to figure out all this stuff. First, you talked about that risk to be clear once you actually get to that point, but now you’ve got someone that’s embracing this potential beautiful opportunity this game, or relieving this pain. Now in order for them to just buy it to the rest of the list, the other committee members, they need to quantify the value of that vision.
30:42
Jason Smith
This is where you as a seller have to be an expert in what does it mean? Chasing chickens, this goes back to time spent, right? That’s a very small bottom line benefit. If you talk about the time that they say that they care a lot to other things, now you can quantify how much more they could spend on this other project that’s been lacking or quantify the mistakes that they’ve been making. It’s not about that little bit of time savings that you calculate by man hours. It’s the cost of a mistake when they miss something. Now you quantify it. The person you’re talking to already believes it. They’re working with you, giving you insights that they didn’t want to give you before. Now they want the vision. Now they’re going to help you provide the value. They will go into there. You know, looking at it.
31:35
Jason Smith
Let me, let me do a quick time study. I’ll get back to you next week. Call me on Thursday at three o’clock. I’ll tell you exactly how long it takes. And Jason, you help me quantify this. Had that happened all the time because this person wants it. Now you have a sponsor inside the organization who is working to help you build this value of this vision that you all now share. Right?
31:54
Tom Stanfill
I love it. Yeah. That’s a great, that’s a really great point. It’s it’s the person that you’re working with. They may have just through the conversations intuitively get it. It’s like you’ve used, you’ve helped them. You’ve addressed their pain, what they want. They, they’re, they can see it now, but they’ve got to sell it upstream. Potentially. He may not be working with the decision-maker. That’s usually, especially you’re working with a company. There’s a lot of products. A lot of times you’re working with people who buy those products. Not ultimately people that are driving the division or our executives, but they’ve got to, if you’re moving beyond their budget and you’re selling this vision, it’s probably not in their budget, which is a risk. Right. We still had, I want to underscore that point. We don’t, sometimes we don’t want to oversell something. We don’t want it if they can only afford.
32:44
Tom Stanfill
The reality is they can only buy a product or maybe a co a bundle of products. You sell this vision, that’s going to cost 10 X. What they have a budget for. You may be shooting yourself in the foot. You’ve got to be careful, but let’s just say you’re working together. You feel like you need to sell this vision up. You’re saying, make sure that you can specifically quantify and help them sell the story, the vision to the other people in the organization who ultimately you are going to be there. Now, did you try to go with them to help them make that presentation?
33:22
Jason Smith
Yeah, I try to. Again, I think a lot of people listening to this will agree that you don’t always get a chance to do that. This is where the specific language becomes so important. A lot of times I’ve heard other methodologies to describe the concept of preparing your champion, arming your champion, right? You remember, Saul put his armor on Daniel to go forward David to face Goliath, right? That’s the, I did, so you got to arm your champion to go forward and do battle. I don’t like that analogy you would have fighting, but you get the idea. You’re preparing them, giving them the tools to go forward, right? The language you use to describe the current state, right? The line was used to describe that future date has to be crystal clear and simple. That way every conversation that happens without you has a higher chance of carrying that emotional weight, because you picked great simple phrases to send forward.
34:26
Jason Smith
That’s those heuristics for the emotional pain. Now you can get more people bought in, right? Those words are catchy. Those word pictures were really catchy. Now with several repeats, chasing chickens to the next person up the line, that person not saying that, yeah, I don’t wanna chase chickens and I’ll, they’ll participate in that time study. They’ll Hey, we’re working with IBM. We’re going to, we’re going to try to stop chasing chickens here that could really help you feel better. Let’s go ahead and give this IBM guy some ammunition to go back and quantify the solution for us. Will you actually track the time it takes for you to monitor these alerts, by the way, how many times were you wrong this month? Oh, 32 and a half times. Two and a half times. All right, cool. I’ll go back by myself and calculate how much that cost us, by the way you’re fire.
35:11
Jason Smith
32 was way too much. Right? Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s what happens when you can get clear on that language, those pictures that quantify, or excuse me, that encapsulate that emotion right now, they’re willing to help you do the other work of quantifying this complex. Or as we said, intangible value, right? It gives that a substance to those intangible metrics of things like that again, and it can go way outside of technology, right? Let’s think about it. You’re saving time for those data center maintainers, they got better satisfaction. That means you can retain more talent. Hey, talent retention just made it to the annual report. We’ll just talk to wall street about increasing employee retention by 30%. Now your little measly plumbing solution, your enterprise middleware, that doesn’t seem sexy at all. Ooh. Now it’s helping the CEOs vision of employee retention because you took the time to help translate that and find the value in that vision.
36:14
Jason Smith
That made sense to the entire bottom line to the enterprise solution.
36:19
Tom Stanfill
Let me wrap it up because I think you’ve made some really good points in a really simple really approach makes so much sense, but it’s actually really simple. You’re saying start case set your product aside set your 10,000 products aside. You might want to leverage of sung something hot, new right to get in the door. Right? We got to start with maybe a perceived problem. The customer has, but we will get in the door, set all that aside, even though they may want to talk about the thing that they know you for, how IBM provides this, let’s talk about that. Let’s set that aside and say, you have a current state, everybody you’re talking to has a current state and have a desired future state. Like I think of it as I’m going to there one side of the canyon there, they want to go on the other side and I want to know what that is, why they want it.
37:08
Tom Stanfill
What’s at stake. Why is that so important to them? Why is that? And what’s their plan without you. What’s their plan to get there that allows you to step back and create a know what the right solution is. When you go back to articulate how you can help them do that, keep it simple, organize it around the current state, future state, same thing, the same bridge and the plan to get there, give them the tools and the language to make it simple, to communicate that back to either whether your community to them or they need to communicate it upstream. That’s how you sell a solution and become one of the stars that IBM now you’re teaching other people to do the same thing.
37:55
Jason Smith
That’s it? Yeah. I didn’t know it at the time. I had no idea that even way back then in 2008, 2010, way back then I was using these universal principles that now you guys have been so good at, with 20 plus years before me to articulate and quantify into these ASLAN concepts. I was using ASLAN before I knew how to spell it right.
38:20
Tom Stanfill
Alright. I love it. Well, there’s no new truth. There’s the, the most effective way to sell and serve your customers is the most effective way to sell and serve your customers. I mean, we’re not changing that. We’re just our role at Aslan, as is just to help sellers it easier for them to understand that and apply it and recognize the truth. Because ultimately there are certain laws that drive why people buy what motivates people to buy, how you can communicate to them, what drives relationships. That’s really, our role is in selling is really to understand what you described today is like, what’s the know I think of the bridge is really their whiteboard. What’s on their whiteboard. What are they, what do they want? Help them get that and better at helping them get that than the other options that they have. Another great episode, man, I’d love to have you on the show, Jason.
39:11
Tom Stanfill
If, if you guys enjoyed having Jason’s message, as well as the podcast, please share that with us online, give us a review and let us know what you like, what you don’t like so that we can improve and do a better job of serving. Thanks again for joining us for another episode of SALES with ASLAN.
