How to Think Like Your Buyer & Become Good at Sales

The Love-Hate Relationship Between Sales and Marketing

Louis: So we started chatting a bit before that and I told you that one thing I want to touch on pretty quickly is the, the tension between sales and marketing in terms of functions inside of company. Right. It’s funny, in every organization I’ve worked with, when there is a sales function and there is obviously a marketing function, it’s always, always the same thing. There doesn’t seem to be much respect between the two. There’s always seems to be a huge big silos. It’s very, there’s this very obvious love hate relationship between the two. So from your experience then, where do you think it’s coming from? Like why, why is that in the first place?

Susan Englehutt: It’s a massive question. I wish I had the silver bullet Answer. Let me tell you my feeling today as a salesperson. So I like, I am so close to my buyer, I imbibe them. I like, I know exactly what they’re thinking. And I am terrified. I am terrified of anything that would be perceived as a platitude, as something general, as something that doesn’t really fit them. It’s something that when they don’t hear it and they don’t see it, that, like, it doesn’t resonate with them, they don’t say, how did those people know the words that are going on in my head? And for me, that’s the fear. So in my early career, I was actually, I think my second job in corporate America in a tech company. They set me up as the worldwide field manager. So I actually reported to the senior vice president of marketing, but I actually worked for the senior vice president of sales. And I went back and forth between the two groups on a weekly basis trying to figure out what is it that’s missing in the gap. And I truly didn’t have a clue what really might be at the bottom of it until I started to understand sales methodology and started to understand how the buyer buys. And when I saw that this was before content marketing, and when I saw that, it was like, whoa, why did nobody tell me this 10 years ago? Because that’s the place where we can come together.

Louis: Just to clarify before we go deeper into this, what type of organization usually have a sales function? And I know it sounds, maybe, might sound a bit silly, but not every company has salespeople, right? So usually, what are the companies that tend to have them over the ones who don’t?

Susan Englehutt: What types of companies have a sales function versus what types don’t? So I work with B2B companies, usually at the moment somewhere between a million in revenue and 25 million in revenue. It can go higher than that. So if they’re selling online, 100% have gone online and it’s an online sales process, click, free trial, et cetera. They may not have a sales process. It may be more of a. A marketing process that runs that. But for me, all of my customers have a sales force that works. You know, either. Maybe they don’t even have a marketing function at this point, but they have a sales force and there’s some aspect of direct selling.

Louis: So some of them might not have a marketing function.

Susan Englehutt: Not yet.

Louis: Even after you said between. You said between 10 and 25 million or 1 in 1 and 20.

Susan Englehutt: Between 1. Between 1. Yeah. So, you know, I have a client right now and they have. I’m not saying it’s a good idea, Louis, but they have, they’re about, I think it’s about 13 million. It’s about a 20, 20 year old company, something like that services industry, just getting into technology. And it’s only in the last six months that I’ve noticed that they’re actually doing quote unquote marketing. They have a great reputation, they have huge brand name customers. Their business is referral or they’re prospecting, they’re doing business development. They’ve built themselves up to 15 million that way.

Louis: I think it’s fair to say that they might not have a marketing function per se, where someone is called a marketer, but they’ve been doing marketing even if they didn’t know they were right.

Susan Englehutt: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Yeah, that’s fair.

Louis: So going back to the initial question, let’s go deeper into that. Where is there a tension you said you moved between the two functions. What did you see as the biggest gap between the two then? What do you see that marketers were not doing, the salespeople were doing and vice versa?

Susan Englehutt: The biggest gap is that the marketing people didn’t have an understand of who the buyer really was and they didn’t understand how the buyer really bought. And it’s unfortunate, but so it, you know, what they produced came off as light and really not that useful to the sales team. That was the biggest gap.

Louis: Yeah, it happens a lot. Right. And because there are removes from the process, they manage the Facebook page and whatever, I mean, that’s the cliche, right? They just don’t do, do much. And yet, yes, salespeople talk to customers and buyers all the time. So they have a very deep understanding of it. Any other, any other thing that you think are, are kind of responsible for this tension beside this, the big ones, like the fact that they don’t talk.

Susan Englehutt: Just one, just one comment on what we just talked about and just it’s, it isn’t brain surgery for a marketer to, to take in some of that wonderful, wonderful understanding of what, how a buyer buys and what they really need to know that it is doable. And so the other thing is, I think there’s a tension between like as a salesperson, I want to talk, I don’t need to talk to somebody who is just ready to close now. I know there are junior salespeople and their sales team that are just push, push, push, and that’s what they want for marketing. I don’t need that. I need someone who is an ideal customer has passed, in my language, the road test and the speed test. So they’ve been qualified according to ideal customer that the sales team has defined. And then I know I have the right buyer. And you know what, that buyer may not buy tomorrow, they may not buy next week, next month. But if I have the right buyer in the right type of company with all these other characters characteristics around them which tell me that, wow, someday when something change, changes and they’re ready to go, that will be a wonderful customer. That’s what I need. So I’m hyper, hyper focused on is it an ideal customer or not? And I feel like there’s a tension between sales and marketing. I want, as a salesperson, I to want, I want quality doesn’t mean something that’s going to close tomorrow. I don’t need quantity. I’d rather have quality.

Louis: So after a while, good salespeople who have good experience, they are able to recognize, okay, this person is not going to cut it. It’s not going to get it. We’ve never closed someone who’s at that role in that type of company. It’s very, very unlikely. While marketers, the marketing function can say, well, we spend, I don’t know, $500 each, like to bring all of those leads, and you’re telling me that they’re not going to work. Just try it, you know, just try it already. What do you think is going to work?

Susan Englehutt: And you know, some of that comes down to what we’ve talked about before, but some of it may come also down to the difference between Persona and ideal customer. So I’m owning ideal customer as a very deep, deep, deep definition and many layers and levels, like super deep versus the buyer’s Persona or the buying Persona, which is, again, it’s light. It’s a photograph. It’s a little bit of demographics. It’s a picture, it’s a, it’s a face with an age and a name.

Louis: That’s the wrong, in my, I mean, in my opinion. And then let’s see what you think on this. But in my opinion, the two should be the same. And buyer Persona very a lazy way for marketers to do the job. And as you said, using demographics that are usually useless. No one cares about their age unless it’s very specific. You’re selling something that is very relevant to age, but other than that, useless. And yeah, the two should be the same, right? There’d be a difference.

Susan Englehutt: They should be the same. So if that were defined between the two teams and whenever I work with A company, it is. It’s defined. The marketing team is always invited to every single session, and so that’s defined. And then another thing, if we could have another thing defined together, which is the sales roadmap, and that, you know, a little bit different than a playbook maybe. But if we have a sales roadmap defined, which is aligned to the buying process, wow, that’s super helpful. Super helpful to a marketing person.

Louis: Okay, so. So maybe we can. We can deep dive into that, because what we promised at the start of the show is we’ll teach marketers to. To think more like and behave more like, you know, salespeople, and so that they can serve the buyers at the end of the. Of the process. So maybe let’s take an example of you working for clients and using the process that you use with them. And obviously, you don’t have to use names or anything like that, but you can lean on past experiences. Obviously. Usually when you start working for a company, what’s the biggest problem you come in to solve? Like, why are they even. Why do they need you in the first place?

Susan Englehutt: So they’re either in one of two states, they may be successful already, and then they’ve gotten to a point where we know we have to hire more salespeople. We know we have to do something different in order to scale this. And they may or may not use the word scale, depending if they’re in the tech industry. Right. But we need to scale this. We’ve tried it before. We tried to hire salespeople. I’m the CEO or I’m here. The first three people that sold this thing, we know how to do it, but we don’t know how to transfer that to other people. So they could be in that state, or they could be in a state where something’s not working. Something’s not working. We’re losing a lot of these deals. People aren’t resonating with what we’re saying. There’s a roadblock somewhere, or there are multiple roadblocks, and we just don’t know what’s happening.

Louis: And what’s the most painful of those two, do you think?

Susan Englehutt: I think the former is most painful because it’s also harder to construct what the answer is to the problem. The latter, when they’ve had some success or even some really decent success, there’s always some. Somebody in the company that imbibes like. Like truly lives the buyer in their body. And. And so I can spot that person within minutes and. Or maybe there are multiple people, and I go, aha, Somebody here gets it. They don’t know how to explain it to any, but they get it. They get it. And if I can overlay the buying process and thinking, a way of thinking and sales process over that, we can take that out, put into a sales process, and we can give it to sales and give it to marketing, and we can help them. So in one, we have way more raw materials, and the other one, we have to make stuff up more.

The Intuitive Salesperson - Spotting Those Who Get It

Louis: So which one do you want to cover? I mean, I want. Let’s. Let’s deep dive into the something that you said that was interesting to me, which is you can spot this person from a mile away, like, very quickly. You know that they get it. So what’s. How do you know? Like, what’s the process there, Louis?

Susan Englehutt: I wish. I wish I knew. Let me give a stab. I’m a highly intuitive person. Not everybody has a high level of intuition. There’s a language they speak. I think that would be the first clue. And when they speak the language, talking about a client or a prospect, it’s a natural language that isn’t their language. They’re actually using words that a buyer uses. And when they talk, they’re talking, you know, if they’re talking about the conversation they’ve had with the buyer, it’s a certain level of conversation. So if you were to take salespeople and divide them into two groups, 20% of them are intuitive, and they know what to do, and they hardly know how to explain it. And 80% of them need a process overlaid so that they know how to behave like that. 20%. So this person that I’m spotting is in that 20%, right? They’re talking to a different person usually, and they are having a different conversation. So they’re usually talking to someone higher, a higher. The conversation they’re having with their customer is about a higher purpose than just the product and the features. And then the people who don’t get it, like, immediately, they’re saying, well, this doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. We need this, we need that. The price is too high, the price is too high. The price is too high. And I say the price is never the problem. Let’s take a look at what’s really going on here. So there’s just a very different behavior. And the first person will have, like, you know, they’ll have their. Their head lifted high and they’re full of hope. And then the second person is like, yeah, I don’t have the systems and things around me or the Other part of the group, I don’t have the systems, I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the leads. The leads aren’t good. We need a new brochure. The demo stinks. And on and on and on.

Louis: Yeah, I was about to mention the confidence aspect. I think you can see them as well from a mile away when it comes to their behavior and their body language, even, and everything, because they have confidence in their abilities. They close bigger deals, they talk the talk. They are able to use the words, as you said, that customers use. They are much more confident than the others, who tend to blame, as you said, everything else but themselves, in a sense, which I’m not saying they are to blame 100%, but I’m saying that, yeah, I can understand definitely the difference between the two. Okay, so you come in to fix this problem. Let’s assume that, yeah, we have a few people, at least one person in house, who, who has this intuition, who gets the customer, the process, the objections, who can sell. What do you do next? Like, how do you transform that into something that is useful for everyone? And especially then as a marketer, like, how do we get into that mix?

Changing the Mindset - You’re the Co-Pilot, Not the Driver

Susan Englehutt: So I will look to you for your help to transfer that to marketing, too. So the first thing I do, regardless of whether that person, that intuitive person or people are there and they are, the first thing I do is I have to change the way they think. So I spend the first half day or more with them, with the executive salespeople and with the marketing team, changing the way they think. So I’m overlaying. This is the way a buyer buys. This is how they act. And I want you to watch them. If they’re here, what does that mean? If they’re there, what does that mean? If they do this, what does that mean? If they do that, what does that mean? So I’m giving them a mindset and changing the way they think. And often I used to time it. I don’t time it anymore, but often I used to time it and say, how long is it going to take this company to come to a major aha moment? Like, whoa, now we understand why this wasn’t working, whether it comes from executive sales or marketing. And sometimes it was 15 minutes, sometimes it was 42 minutes, sometimes it was 23 minutes. But very early on, they had this, wow, I didn’t know that if we looked at it from this point of view, from the point of view of the buyer, how much of a difference that would make. And part of that Part of that mindset, and I think that’s a big part of the first five or six steps of what I do is you are on a road trip with your buyer. The buyer’s journey, let’s just use that literally. We’re on a road trip with your buyer. You’re in a car with them. It’s a two seated car. There’s just two seats in it, nice little coupe. And it’s you and your buyer. Which one is the driver? 75% of the people come back and they say, oh, well, the seller is. The buyer is the driver. No, no, no, no, no. The buyer is always the driver. They’re the ones that are in control. They know the decision they’re going to make. They know they’re the ones with the money. They know how they’re going to process through this. They’re keeping lots of secrets from you, likely, and they’re the one that’s in control. So then, well, what is the role of the seller? What is the. Well, yeah, so you’re a co pilot. You’re sitting in the other seat and you’re, you have, but you have this thing, you have a roadmap that says, this is how I get from here to the destination, which is a close deal with this prospect. If it’s the right fit, if it ideal customer. And so you’re sitting in that passenger seat and you’re watching every single move they make. You’re listening to the words they speak to. But words are cheap, right? It’s easy to say things, but you’re especially watching their behavior and saying, okay, what did they just do? Oh, they just went off my roadmap there. I know that if they don’t do that or if they just did that, they’re never going to get to the place where they can buy this. So we gently suggest, what about this? Did you think about that? This, this. What about involving that person? Did you ever have this problem? And we’re trying to navigate them back onto the highway that we have defined in our roadmap, which is this is the way people buy from us. So that’s the first step.

Louis: Is it really the first step? Because it seems like you have. What I mean by this is that you mentioned that you already have the buyer’s journey in front of you. In a sense, you already understand how their buyers think and stuff like that. So is it, is that really the first step?

Susan Englehutt: I understand how buyers think and I overlay how buyers think to how their buyers think. So there is a foundation which is Common. Whether I’m buying a chocolate bar, a house, or whether I’m buying a $3 million technology solution, there is a common buying process.

Louis: So what is it?

The Three-Stage Buying Process - Why, What, and How

Susan Englehutt: Let me put it this way. And then I’ll share a second step of that buying process with you. So the buying process, I mean, it’s the foundation. Let’s just take the HubSpot example of the buyer’s journey. What are the words they use? Awareness, consideration and decision, I think is what they use, right? From a marketing point of view, buying process is way more complicated than that. But I think that it’s beautiful to simplify it into three stages, because we can remember three things, right? When I look at the buying process, I use the language, why, what and how for those three stages. So why should I change from the way I’m doing things today? What are my options and how risky is it for me to make the decision to work with you? Now, underneath that, there’s all kinds of substance, right? But if we start with that basic, basic concept, then we can go to the next level and we can say, okay, next step is, okay, does it make a difference where I meet that buyer in their buying process? So we have to work with the assumption that in some sales process or some buying process, there’s multiple buyers, right? In some, there’s just a single buyer across all those three stages. If you draw the buyer’s journey out as rectangle, a landscape rectangle, and then divide it into three equal columns, and then you put why, what and how over those three, Then if I find them in the first or if they find me when they’re in the first stage of their buying process, under why? And these numbers can be very controversial, but I work with the 8020 rule almost all the time. So if they find me or I find them when they’re in the first stage of their buying process and why, I have about 80% chance of closing that. If they find me or I find them through SEO or they’re doing a search or whatever, they find me in the what stage of their buying process, then I have about 20% of closing that. And really, most of my customers saying, really, Susan, our close rate is much lower than that. And if you’re highly differentiated in a really well oiled machine, maybe it’s, maybe it is that, maybe it’s higher. And if they come to me and it’s all. Or I find them in that last part of their buying process where they’re just about ready to make a decision and they’re just evaluating Is it, you know, should I really go with these people? Is it risky? Then I have 0% chance of winning that effectively. Right. So I’m very interested. It’s one of the first things I ask as a salesperson. One of the first things that I teach a company is, whoa, where did that buyer come from? Tell me where they came from and tell me what their title is. Tell me the questions they were asking you. Tell me the things that they asked you for and tell me the things that they looked at on your website. And I go, bing, bing, bing, bing, bang, bang, bop. And I go, ah, Yep. They’re in the what stage of the buying process? I know that buyer and that buyer is, I have 20% chance of winning this. This is highly, highly competitive. So what do I need to do about that? So depending on how they fit my ideal client, I might just say, you know what, disengaging, that’s not worth my time. Or there’s some things I have to do because it’s that kind of a buyer. Does that make sense so far?

Louis: Absolutely. No. It’s very interesting, which is why I didn’t interrupt you. Yeah. It is simple, yet it’s very powerful. The way I visualize it is, I don’t know if you’ve seen these graphics shared before around the job to be done methodology, where you have the person that is at the bottom of the hill, they climb the hill and then they arrive at the top. So the why is the bottom. It’s where they are at the status quo. Right. The actual state they are in the situation and they are looking. They might struggle with it, but they’re just starting to think, what if we do something different here? Right. And think maybe of what if we can we do something and we fix this problem. So that’s the top of the hill. And as you said, so it’s the Y what and how in that order, right?

Susan Englehutt: Yes, that’s right.

Louis: So the what is they are looking at alternatives and stuff like what could they do? Right. But it’s not necessarily, should we go for HubSpot or should we go for another CRM or inbound marketing solution? It’s not yet there. It’s more, should we hire a consultant first? Should we buy a software? Should we hire more people?

Susan Englehutt: Is that, I think the what embodies both of those things that you just said? It embodies the actual solution we’re going to buy. It also embodies doing it ourselves. It also embodies doing nothing. Right.

Louis: That is an alternatives.

Susan Englehutt: Yeah, they’re all alternatives. And I could say, yeah, I could get a consultant first and then we’ll go through this process. Or I could just say, hey, could you please go and just Google this and see what you come up with. Whatever our internal due diligence process is

Louis: to find people, it’s already turned from a job to a job to be done. They’ve already decided that the service is not good enough and they’re moving.

The Critical Bridge - Why Buyers Turn Back

Susan Englehutt: You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. And I know the job to be done methodology a bit. I’ve never seen that graphic, so I think I like it. Right. So if you look at, there’s a transition point between, there’s a transition point if as you go up your hill or as I go through, down my highway through these three stages, right, there’s a transition point and right, right between the what, the. The why and the what. There’s a little river. Okay, There’s a little river and there’s this huge or big river. There’s a massive river actually, and there’s this huge bridge that goes over it. And the buyer goes, ah. And maybe there’s a toll at the bridge. There’s. There’s a definitely a toll at the bridge. And the buyer says, ah, do I really go forward or not? Do I really go forward or not? And this, this is so important because as you’re watching a buyer and you’re like, they’re not going to go process linearly, they’re not going to go along this highway in a perfectly linear fashion. They’re not going to climb your heels steadily, steadily, like somebody that’s super fit and just get right to the end. Like they’re going to come to the, that they’re going to come to that huge bridge with the toll over the massive river and they’re going to say, is this still the number one problem that I should be solving right now? And if it isn’t, zip back a little bit. We go around in circles, right? We go around in circles. We do all kinds of interesting things and we may come back to it. We may not be come back to it for a while. We may never come back to it.

Louis: Yeah, you might just park your car and just leave it. And it just exactly as you said. Is it the most pressing problem, the biggest problem that I’m facing right now because it’s going to mean time, effort sometimes. You mentioned that this process could be used for like even like buying a chocolate bar or anything like that. Now usually for those lower purchase, lower risk thing, they don’t spend days and days thinking about it. They are the supermarket. The why, the what and the how go very quickly, you know, within microseconds sometimes. Right. But for large stuff like, as you said, 3 million house or software that costs 100 grand a year, or like just a big problem in an organization with many people, then this usually takes longer. So the why is again, it’s the status quo or moving away from that. It’s recognizing that I have a problem, but I don’t know how I’m going to solve it and whether or not I actually want to solve it in the first place.

Susan Englehutt: Right, that is. Right.

Louis: So the what. All of the alternatives and options available to me, whatever that is, and I’m just like looking at each of them, weighing them down. And the how is once I’ve kind of selected one potential option and I just decide on the actual provider or the actual thing, the name of the intern or the. Is that right?

Susan Englehutt: Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly right. So there’s two interesting pieces. Now, let’s just look at either end of that. Right. So we can use my visual or your visual. It doesn’t matter. Where is price? Price is at the very end. It appears. It has a brief appearance at the very beginning, but really it’s at the very end. Okay, I’ll just park that thought. Using that methodology. And I think the buyer may not park their car. The buyer may kick out the salesperson or the salespeople that they’ve engaged with. Right? They kick them out. They just open the door, press the eject seat, boom, off they go, slam the door, skid around, and then say, okay, this is the buying process I have to be on. It’s a different highway, Right? And they go after what they need to do. There’s one thing that happens before any of this happens and before why, what or how. And that one thing that happens is there has to be a change. Because if there is no change, there’s no buying process. And I think this is really, really interesting for marketers. You know, when did you. When did somebody last buy a house? Why did you buy a house? Why did you move from where you were? So there will be lots of answers to that question. Well, we had children or, you know, we had. We increased our salary or we got a job change, or there’s all. There’s always a change as from a salesperson’s point of view. That is so important to me because if I. I could be dealing with the right buyer, I could be dealing with the right problem. But if there is no change, they’re never going to get in the car. They’re sitting in the office and they’re thinking about it, but they’re never actually going to get in the car and go on a trip with me. So I always, you know, if we want to observe the buyer, we also have to ask buyer questions. So why now? Like, why are you doing this now? And it also tells me something. Testing to see if there’s a change tells me, aha. I don’t actually have the buyer. I’ve got someone who’s in the backseat of the car and they open the door for me by reaching over the front seat and they open the door for me and they let me in. But I didn’t even bother checking. But you know what? There’s actually no buyer. There’s no driver here. I’ve got somebody in the backseat and they’re just running me around in circles. But this is. Car has no gas, no battery. It’s not going anywhere.

The Catalyst for Change - What Triggers Buying Decisions

Louis: That’s interesting. The trigger, that’s a critical, like you can call it the catalyst, the trigger, the change. But whatever that is, that is what transform a job in a job to be done thing. Just to go back to a job to be done a bit. That’s exactly, that’s so important. And you talked about moving house. I can give you a real example. We moved the house with my wife a few months ago. I think the trigger was just anticipating, like maybe we’ll have a family soon. So that was that. Knowing that. But I think the biggest trigger was we were sick of the apartment we were in. We wanted more space. I don’t know. It didn’t come to us. We talked about it. Talked about it, talked about it. So it never was an active thing that we started to look into actively. But I think the day, the reason why we moved from like we, the, the actual catalyst to all of this was when we realized that the government was giving a help to buy scheme that allowed us to get like some money back on our taxes if we bought by the end of the year. That was a trigger.

Susan Englehutt: So there were multiple in my languages. Change in your language. Trigger, catalyst. So there were almost multiple, weren’t there? Like it, it’s like I use the, I use the visual. It’s not very positive, but I use the visual of a bomb. I actually take styrofoam balls to workshops, little black bombs. And I just say, you know, if you’re, you’re actually going to build a highway with A customer, you’ve got to blow the rock and all this stuff. So the change, what drops the bomb to incite the buyer to say we have to move forward. So it’s like your house situation. It was multiple bombs were dropped, not even at the same time. Bomb, bomb, bomb. And then finally, ah, the three of them work together and it’s like, whoa, it’s time to move.

Louis: Okay, so that’s a very good, I think, explanation of how buyers think in general. Now how do you then take that, this intuitive understanding that you have and from your experience, years and years of doing this and how do you translate that into the reality of an organization that might have like how basically how do you know those are the catalysts, the change like the bombs and to use your language, the alternatives that they are looking into the options, how do you make them understand it? How do you merge the knowledge that you have into something that is real for them?

Building the Ideal Customer Profile - Road Test and Speed Test

Susan Englehutt: So I’m going to take it. Once I’ve helped them to learn to think like a buyer. So they can now self diagnose, right? They can now go, oh, how would Susan think? Or how would the buyer think? Maybe that’s more important. If they say how did the buyer think? But they often say, how would Susan think? So the next thing that I’m doing is I’m doing the first creating with them the first part of a sales process. I working with them on a three staged qualification process which is all under the heading of ideal customer. And there are three steps in an ideal customer, road test and speed test. I do use the road trip metaphor. So ideal customer would be, you know, the company, the type of company, the size of company, the type of problem, the different roles of the buyer. And we would evaluate a whole bunch of different ones and, and usually we would settle on the ones where the, the problem is a higher level problem. There are four levels of problems and one of them we cannot sell on. One we can, but it’s hard. The other two are beautiful. So that would be the first level. Then we start to define, okay, but at a very detailed level, is there one thing or up to three things that you might find in a prospect or in, you know, in a prospect that is delivered to you by marketing as a lead, are there one, two or three things that if they are present, you cannot work with that company? Because I as a salesperson, I want the sales team to qualify out. Right. I don’t want them to waste their time. So we define that that can be put on a lead form and we qualify out the ones that we just simply can’t work with. Maybe they go into a marketing database and they’re nurtured. Then we proceed onto one of the core tools for the sales team. And that’s a speed test. So three columns, not on purpose. And the first speed is maximum speed, minimum speed and scenic route. So maximum and minimum speed. You know, is this prospect have the potential does this prospect have the potential to go 200km an hour maximum speed? And should I go 200km an hour as a salesperson maximum speed? Well, is. Does this prospect only have the potential to go at 60km an hour and should I therefore make it a second priority and only go at 60km an hour and does the this one on the scenic route? I’m a Nova Scotian, so on a scenic route around the Bay of Fundy along the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, which is beloved to me. But we’re never going to get anywhere anytime soon because we keep stopping to dip in the ocean all the time. So you know what? They’re not going to buy from me. It’s not a good prospect for a salesperson, but it could be for the marketing team. Please nurture them until they get to the point where they can be maximum, minimum seed. And this is super detailed. I used to try to keep it to eight things in maximum speed and minimum speed. I just gave it. It just depends on what the company. But I’m looking like, who is the person who’s buying? What is the problem they’re trying to solve? This problem is maximum speed. That problem’s minimum speed. These problems are scenic route. What is the culture and the mindset? What do they already have? How satisfied are they with what they have? What kinds of requirements do they have? Do we do it today? Super well, kind of. We’re overhanging a bit or not on the roadmap until seven, seven weeks. So do they think everything should be free? Are they willing to pay for the help they need? Or like all kinds of criteria? And so now they’re starting. Now they’re starting not to sell to buyers who cannot buy. And they’re focusing 100% of their attention on buyers who actually can buy. So productivity goes up.

Louis: So let’s take a step back a bit because that makes all the sense in the world. But I think the key step in between that, I wonder is really, how do you gather this information? Do you sit all the salespeople in a room, virtual or not? Do you send surveys to customers? I don’t know how do you get that info?

Gathering Intelligence - Customer Interviews and Skeptical Validation

Susan Englehutt: I do it with three ways. And you’re right, it’s a very, very important step. I use my own acumen. I use the knowledge that is in the room with a healthy dose of skepticism. I decide which resonates with a buying process and which doesn’t. Which resonates with a good sales process. And very, very important. I will often call customers or prospects and speak with them myself. And actually, I was setting up some of those interviews this morning with CEOs of nonprofits. And I will call, ask for 15 minutes of their time. And I’m just trying to sit in that driver’s seat and just sit there. And like, you know how we did when we were children, you know, there was no key, but we play adult and we get in and we, you know, try to work the gears and we, you know, the steering wheel. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just saying all I need is 15 minutes to understand what is your world like? What’s on your mind, what’s keeping you awake at 3 o’ clock in the morning? What are the highest priorities? Where does this one fit in? Like, is it even in the top three? When would it become the top three? What would need to change? And if decided to go forward, how would you do that? And all the time that I’m having these conversations, I’m listening to, what is the language of that buyer? What naturally comes out of their mouth? Because then it’s not business speak that it’s written on the website. It’s not business speak that the salesperson delivers. It’s not technology speak. It’s the natural language that the buyer speaks. And when they hear that in first person, either through marketing or through sales, they go, they just have this level of trust and comfort. They understand my world.

Louis: So do you interview people who have bought recently, or do you interview people who are in the process?

Susan Englehutt: What’s your people who have purchased, people who are in the process, and people that don’t even know the company. So I’ve gone out to my network in the last couple of days and said, who do you know that is a CEO of a nonprofit? And actually, I don’t even care if they’re interested in the product that my client sells. I just need to imbibe. What is happening with that? Why buyer in a nonprofit?

Louis: So before we deep dive into that a bit more, I just want to come back to what you said about the skepticism. When you talk to people in the room who know clients and I know it might be intuitive again and might be difficult to voice out, but what are the typical things that you hear that are bullshit, you know, are bullshit and they’re lying to themselves a bit or the ones that are actually true that you feel. Yeah, this is.

Susan Englehutt: The price is too high. I’m just, just. I’m thinking this through as I’m answering. So I’ll be in the.

Louis: Sure. Me too.

Susan Englehutt: Good. Jump in anytime the price is too high. We need this feature in order to sell. They didn’t buy because we didn’t have X. They ghosted me. I couldn’t get access to that person. I don’t know who that person is. I don’t know the title of the person I was speaking with. I don’t know what changed. And I might ask the question, you know, what problem are they trying to solve? And if I get an answer like, yeah, yeah, the problem is that they need a CRM. That’s a solution. What is the problem? Right. So there. That was nine.

Louis: That’s good. Talking about problems, give me an example of. If you can think back of clients you work with. Recently you said there’s four types of problem two that are quite interesting. Like, what’s the difference between the two types? Should I say, like, very interesting and not interesting at all? Like, how do you. How do you know? Okay, this one is good.

Impact Problems vs. Frustrating Problems - The Four Levels

Susan Englehutt: Let me. I’ll give you the four types and then I’ll give you some examples. So at the bottom, nice to have very B2C. You know, B2C companies can make billions on nice to have products, but not in the B2B world. The next level up is it’s solid, a frustrating problem. So put beside that scent sign, even though we don’t have pennies, at least in Canada anymore, so put the sense sign beside that. Like, yeah, it’s frustrating. We have a workaround. We have to hire a few people to do this, this, that, and the other thing. And so really, it’s not that painful. It’s not that painful. They have a workaround, you can get them to move, but it requires very, very good salesmanship. The next level up is impact. Even if they don’t measure it, they know intuitively that it has an impact on their organization. Top line, bottom line, market share, profitability, revenue costs, whatever. Like, big costs, whatever. The fourth level up, which doesn’t happen very often, it’s not that many companies that sell to these problems is do or die. Right? So it’s not all that common. Companies say, oh, no, I saw a Do or die problem. But actually, no, you solve an impact problem. So the bottom one, you can’t sell on a B2B. The next one, frustrating. You can, but it requires good salesmanship. The next one up impact is beautiful. Beautiful. Now what I see, I want to just stop on that intersection between impact and frustrating. So what I see is I see a lot of frustrating problems being messaged. I see a lot of frustrating problems being targeted by and messaged and marketed and, you know, content marketing around them. I see a lot of less successful, more junior salespeople selling on frustrating problems, lower value problems. But the more seasoned salesperson or the more intuitive salesperson or the more, the more confident salesperson is going for the impact. And sometimes it’s the difference between this is the person I know I need to speak to, which is the person who owns the impact problem versus this is the person that’s easy to get to or this is the person that marketing gave me.

Louis: Yeah, they’ve been given the. They’ve been intro to this, to this person. Maybe in a scenario where the boss just say to this person, hey, do some research. And maybe this person doing research doesn’t feel the pain as much, doesn’t really care about the problem. They’re just being paid to do that and they don’t really understand the ramification potentially while the boss knows that it’s an impact problem. Can you give me an example maybe again from one of the clients you work with recently, the difference between a impact problem versus a frustrating problem? Yes, maybe this sort of difference is

Susan Englehutt: a frustrating problem would be it takes me 70 hours a week to just manage the schedule for the volunteers that I’m using for the food relief programs for the pandemic. An impact problem would be there has never been a greater need in our generation for others to help other humans. And there are so many programs that we could run that fit with our mission, so many causes that we want to help with that. We just don’t have the resources or time to get to them. And we need to free ourselves up to be able to do that. It’s mission critical. Some of those could actually be do or die. I’m just going through a couple of clients. Frustrating problems would be, you’re going to notice a theme. We have to manually take the information. When one of our customers orders something from us, we have to take that manually and take it from the, you know, the person who set the service up for them and manually put that in a finance system. And it takes about three hours every week. For to do that. And it takes somebody who’s qualified to do something else and we really could have them doing something else. And it ends up that, you know, it’s about X number of hours a week versus an impact. Problem is we are losing, we are leaking about 10% of our revenue every month because of these manual transitions, not cross selling and upselling. People not knowing that we provisioned something and we actually didn’t get it in the system and didn’t bill for it. But we’re leaking minimum 10% of our revenue every month. We need to solve that. Now that’s an impact problem. And different buyer. Right. Often can be different buyer.

Louis: So sometimes it sounds like at the root of it, it could be the same problem, but the understanding of the buyer is different. Where they’ve done their analysis internally, they understand that the fact that they are each spending three hours a week on admin instead of doing something else is actually making them lose millions at the end of every year.

Susan Englehutt: Yes.

Louis: And that’s kind of a good salesperson would be able to do that. If you are coming in from frustrating point of view, like this type of problem where they say, well, we are losing three hours a week, a month or day and it would be nice to solve it. Maybe as an experienced buyer, you’d come in and say, well, let me run that through the calculator. And actually it turns out that if you’re each spending three hours a week on admin, as you said, at the end of the year, do you know how much money you’re losing? And then that’s when you transfer to an impact program, Right?

Susan Englehutt: Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s doable. And often those two levels of problems are aligned with two levels of buyers, whether they’re a different person or whether it’s just a different ability, mindset or role. And they’re often, they don’t have to always be, but they’re often aligned with a different source. So inbound or outbound, right now, if you’re marketing to the why buyer and you’re selling to the why buyer, then it’s going to be consistent. It’s going to be usually an impact problem. And if you’re actually really, it depends also on what business you’re in. So you could have defined a business around frustrating problems and you just can’t elevate it above it. So my recommendation often is, wow, that’s going to be hard. That’s going to be really, really hard. You know what, Give me an example. I can think of a company just as clear as day. And I can’t remember what the frustrating problem was. Okay, let me. Okay, I’ll go to another one way back in my archives. Families really should eat together more often and cook meals. But a lot of people don’t know how to cook and they don’t know how to buy and they don’t know how to buy groceries and what to buy and what goes with what. And so we’re going to create a cookbook that says here is the menu for every week and blah blah, blah, blah. That’s a frustrating problem. Like there are so many workarounds for that. Like let’s buy online, let’s get a subscription to people who deliver these gourmet ready made meals. Let’s. It’s just too much hard work to teach them something that they’re not intuitively going to do. That’s a frustrating problem. That business didn’t go anywhere. That was actually B2C which isn’t my space, but it’s what came back to me from years ago.

Louis: I think that’s a very, very good way to put it. And so many businesses are being launched every day on frustrating problems. Yeah, it’s frustrating, but really to make them move and spend time researching and taking a decision like that is just incredibly difficult. It’s an uphill battle. You know, they understand the problem, right? The problem is not the that they don’t understand it.

Susan Englehutt: It’s that it’s the wrong problem.

Louis: They’re not willing to solve it. They don’t really have the willpower to do it because the gains don’t necessarily outweigh the pain that it takes.

Susan Englehutt: That is right.

Louis: Spend time and your attention and talking to sales and whatnot. Last thing I wanted to ask you in this process, which is super interesting, thanks for simplifying that. It’s really, really interesting. So once you have you talk to customers yourself, recent customers, people who are not even customers, you understand them. You lay that on top of your understanding on like the why, the why, the what and the how. What’s the next step, what you like to do then with your clients?

Mapping the Sales Process to the Buyer’s Journey

Susan Englehutt: Then, then I’m going to actually map out a sales process for them. But there’s a step just before that. And the step that is before that is I, I have now learned the good behaviors in the organization, the good sales behaviors that match best practices, that work with the way a buyer buys. And I’ve also identified the poor sales practices. So I have this list of. Here are the things we need to repeat doing. And here are the behaviors we need to change. And they’re usually related to individuals. They can be across the board, but there’s usually pockets of these kinds of things. So I have that list of things that we should continue doing, and so that needs to be hard coded into the sales process. And I have this list of behaviors that need to change. I may not choose all of them at the beginning, but I need to choose at least the most important ones, and I need to hard code that into the sales process. So I have that list. And then I go and I start creating the sales process and say, okay, here. Here’s the buyer’s buying process. Here are the questions we need to ask, the tools we need to use, the things we need to do in order to truly validate that the buyer is actually in that stage of their buying process with us. And if they’re here in this stage, we need to do this to make sure we can move them here or move them back in their buying process. So that last piece, the activities that gets lined up with pipeline stages that are in the CRM that line up with the buying process. There’s one super, super, super, super important thing in mapping out the sales roadmap, and that important thing is, I really don’t care, salesperson. I really don’t care what you just did. I don’t care what you think, I don’t care what you feel. I care what the buyer said, and most importantly, I care about what the buyer did because it tells me where the buyer is in their buying process. So a lot of what is embedded into the roadmap are questions and activities that will help to validate where’s the buyer in their buying process. Because the salesperson could be at 80% close. 80% probability closing. Right. You know, I did the discovery call. I asked those questions like rote, and I gave the demo and I sent the quote. It’s at. At 80%. It’s at 80% of you finished. But it’s. The buyer is actually, sorry, the buyer is still back at 20%. So that’s what I’m trying to accomplish in the sales roadmap is lining up the selling behaviors with. With the buyer.

Louis: Well, Susan, you’ve been absolute pleasure to talk to. I really love the way you simplify stuff for everyone to understand. Even people are not salespeople. And I think at the end of the day, what matters in this exercise is that it’s all about the people buying stuff. Right? That’s how the. They pay our salary and the best way maybe to relieve the tension between marketing and sales as we talked at the start, is to have a common understanding of that. Truly a good understanding and being able to say, okay, how do we go in together to help them solve their problems and in the meantime also solve ours and make money. So yeah, thank you very, very much for your time. Just have one question to ask you before I let you go. Where can people ask you questions and connect with you and learn more from you?

Susan Englehutt: LinkedIn I’m the only prison anglehead on the planet. At least on the LinkedIn planet they can go to my company website the way buyers buy as well. And if they click on the blog, they’ll see a series in there of some of this thinking which might be helpful.

Louis: And maybe just spell out your last name for everyone in case they’re listening in the cash.

Susan Englehutt: Yes E N G L E H U T T Brilliant.

Louis: Well, once again Susan, you’ve been a pleasure. Thanks so much for sharing all your wisdom and experience working with so many people and companies.

Susan Englehutt: Thank you very much.

Louis: You’re welcome. And that’s it for another episode of everyone hates marketers.com thank you so much for listening. I’m super, super grateful. I’d love for you to consider subscribing to my daily newsletter Monday to Friday called Stand the Out Daily. I send very short, hopefully interesting, surprise, shocking, entertaining content to help you Stand the fuck Out. It’s at everyone hatesmarketers.com you can subscribe for free and obviously unsubscribe whenever you want. I’m just gonna read a couple of emails that I got recently as a reply. Juma said, your content attacks the mind primarily, which is such a good thing because most of us are skilled at what we do, but we don’t have the courage to do it our way. Mark, who just subscribed a couple days as before, said, this is my first issue of your newsletter. Love it. Glad I subscribed. Brianna said, I just realized this morning that my email habit is now to 1. Skim through the list. 2. Select all unread industry email except yours. 3. Delete and don’t think twice. 4. Quickly skim yours. Amy said, Also loving the new content that’s coming from you. It feels really lovely. I like your writing a lot. It really resonate. There’s so much out there. It’s good to touch the authentic. And Chloe said, where is the I love this email button? Brilliant. I hope you subscribe. You’ll be joining more than 14,000 subscribers at this stage, which is crazy. It’s the size of a small stadium. Anyway, thank you so much. See you on the other side.