Talk Triggers: Word Of Mouth Marketing with Daniel Lemin
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Episode Summary:
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Talk Triggers: Word Of Mouth Marketing with Daniel Lemin
I am thrilled and honored to have Daniel Lemin. He is a startup co-founder, trusted advisor and the bestselling author on reputation management, digital marketing and social media customer service. He was an early member of Google’s global communications team. Daniel led the launch of products in North America and around the world. He is the CMO and Co-Founder of Selectivor, a food intelligence startup that helps people stay healthy through personalized eating. His book with co-author Jay Baer, Talk Triggers, is going to be a New York Times bestseller. It explores word of mouth marketing and lays out a framework so you can build that in your own organization. You want to have something that’s memorable and Talk Triggers gives you those ways to do it. He’s an expert commentary on television. He has got that anchorman smile. He’s smart and handsome. Daniel, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Take us back to when you were growing up in Ohio. You can go back to your childhood, high school, college, wherever you want, when you said, “I’m going to get into high tech.” Obviously, Google when you were younger that didn’t even exist. I’d love to hear what your background was of how you got into what you’re doing.
To some degree, I don’t know is the answer. That’s true for many people. You look back and think, “I’m not sure how I got into doing the things I’ve done, but I’m grateful I did.” Part of it though, I’ve always been a curious kid and also a kid that had a curious mind. I always wondered how things worked, why things worked and I tried tinkering with things to make them work better. I was always drawn to technology for that reason. I enjoy the challenges of it and also the gold rush. There’s always something new and bigger. There’s always a moon shot happening somewhere in the tech world, including several happening right now. There’s always been that curiosity for me. I always assumed that I would work in marketing as a kid. That was the only thing I was ever good at. I tried doing other endeavors, but none of them anywhere near with success.
[bctt tweet=”If you are assuming that your best chance to captivate a customer is to be the best in your category, then you’re going to struggle for a long time.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Tell us what it was like to be one of the early members of Google. What was that atmosphere like? What can you say looking back, how the culture has evolved?
I was employee number 400 at the company. I worked on this scrappy little marketing communications team. There were about eight of us in total at the time. The fun part about that was seeing the company explode around us in all different areas, from employee size to new markets, launching internationally new products, and new product space. They’ve launched so many innovations when I was there in the first couple of years.
[bctt tweet=”Nobody ever talks about average so you need to be remarkable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It solidified for me, in my mind, the value of never resting on your laurels. You never assume that everything is done. The work is never done. You always continue to change things. You continue to think about ways you can do something better. That’s in part how I’ve approached my career after Google in marketing. It’s always looking for better ways to do things. It was a good training ground for me from that perspective. It was also an amazing place to work.
That has led you to your own startup, Selectivor. You’re applying AI intelligence to helping us all get healthier.
The broad mission is to help people stay healthy and well through whatever diets they may be following, both health and personal guidance. We’re building a whole host of AI tools to do that. We’ll help you find recipes that work for you. We’ll help you find restaurants and things that work for you. That’s the mission and the broad story behind that are personal struggles that both I and my co-founder had trying to stay on our diets. In the context of eating with other people, sometimes that conversation’s uncomfortable. You don’t want to tell them about your dietary needs. This has been the biggest buzzkill in the world, “I’d love to go on a date with you. I can’t eat this and I can’t eat that. I don’t eat this and I won’t eat that. Aren’t you looking forward to meeting me?” It’s extracting some of that social friction out of the equation in the process of doing that.
I’ve read some research that if you tend to have overweight friends, you are more likely to be overweight and vice versa. If you tend to have fit, healthy friends, you’re more likely to be fit. Since you’re an expert in data and software, does that ring true? Are you incorporating that into your company?
It completely rings true. There’s a famous landmark study from the ‘60s, the Framingham Heart Study. They wrote about it in that book, Connected. It’s a landmark study looking at how communities impact the health of its members. Obese communities tended to remain obese and lose weight together when they started. It is truly that connected. In fact, one of the things we’re building into our product is the ability to challenge yourself and others to do something, stay on a diet, drink more water, and eat more watermelon, whatever it might be. That notion of challenging each other is a much more playful way to do things together. It impacts how we think about the product.
Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth
Let’s dive into Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers With Word Of Mouth. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my advertising background is word of mouth is much more powerful than any paid ad and commercial. Getting these brand ambassadors to talk about you and spread the word, the trust factor is huge. How did you and Jay Baer decide to work together?
I’ve known and worked with Jay for a decade, even more than that. I hired Jay at an agency I worked at in Downtown Los Angeles. I hired Jay there to help us on the agency side with innovation and bring some outside thinking. I liked working with him so much that I decided to leave that agency and work with him. I’ve worked with him on the consulting side since 2010.
This is a big collaboration with a lot of insights together. The cover of the book looks like two llamas nestling each other. What animals are those?
They’re alpacas nestling. They’re from Peru.
What is the significance of that picture?
It’s a simple story. The first version of the cover from our publisher was less than remarkable. It wasn’t terribly exciting. Widely panned might be a phrase I would use to describe that. We were looking for something that people would remember and talk about. Have you seen another business book with alpacas whispering to each other on the cover? It’s unique. It’s also hot pink. It’s connected to one of the case studies inside. That’s the story behind the cover. We’ve taken it to a ludicrous extreme. We’re all over now alpaca GIFs and memes. We’ve even been to an alpaca farm together, Baer and me.
The premise is you want to say something that triggers a conversation, which is what a good pitch does. The second part for me, from what I can tell that you’re offering people, does not only do it trigger a conversation but it triggers a memorable conversation. Can you give us an example?
The hero insight that led us to write this book was that the economic impact of word of mouth. The things we say amongst ourselves as buyers, investors and consumers of things, the economic impact of that is much more massive than we might assume. 20% of every purchase decision that’s made is directly driven by word of mouth discussion or recommendation. The challenge is few companies have an actual strategy to make word of mouth happen. They assume that it happens. You probably know from a gut feel as well as we did, that doesn’t happen. It’s a gamble you take that someone’s going to talk about your brand. We started looking at examples of companies that do something a little bit different in the delivery of their surface.
[bctt tweet=”Listen to customers to find the gap where a talk trigger can happen.” username=”John_Livesay”]
For example, the UberConference. What’s great about UberConference is if you’ve ever been on a conference call from UberConference, you may be familiar with their country, Twain-y hold music. It’s a hilarious song. It’s all about being on hold. You can go check it out, Google UberConference hold song. You’ll quickly find it. The impact of that when you’re on hold and then end up on the call nearly every single time someone says, “Did everybody else here that hold music? That was amazing.” In fact, if you go on Twitter, even on Google and search for UberConference hold music, people go crazy for that song. What they have done is nothing magical. They built in a slightly different way of filling a customer experience gap, in this case with hold music. That was the spark. That is an actual idea. That’s a Talk Trigger. It generates some material for a consumer to work with. It gives them a story to tell. That’s the hero insight behind it.
It’s an interesting thing that something could be so engaging that people would go listen to hold music while they’re not on hold.
UberConference hired Postmodern Jukebox to do a remix of it in multiple different genres.
You give keynote talks on this topic as well. Who is your ideal audience that needs to know how to have Talk Triggers?
The interesting thing is it spans all industries, even as individuals. We can all benefit from having a personal Talk Trigger. Jay Baer, if you’ve seen him speak, he wears crazy plaid suits. He’s always dressed impeccably. As individuals, we can benefit from it. I do a lot of work with associations, small business owners and corporate workshops to companies looking to try to figure out the best type of Talk Trigger basically to deploy. It’s a wide range but a lot of work with small business owners who frankly can probably benefit from it the most.
To me, it seems with the problem you’re solving here is many of the people that I work with, whether I’m giving a keynote talk on how to be a better storyteller and therefore increase sales is this concept of objection around price. You’re a commodity. We don’t see the value in paying your premium price. I don’t care if it’s food you’re selling or a design of an architecture firm. People have a lot of trouble justifying a premium price. How does your keynote and Talk Trigger help people with that particular challenge?
Word Of Mouth: The economic impact is more massive than how we assumed it to be in terms of the things we say amongst ourselves and buyers, investors, and consumers of our products.
Part of that is if you are assuming that your best chance to captivate a customer is to be the best in your category, you’re going to struggle for a long time. Even the best restaurants in the world, from a technical perspective, still struggle to get butts in seats. What is the reason for that? Is it the price? Maybe, but is lowering the price going to get them across that chasm? It might even hurt you in the end. Robert Cialdini always talks about this, the Pre-Suasion. If by the time someone calls you, comes into your restaurant or opens the door to your store, they’ve already decided they like you. They’ve already decided that they’re willing and able to do business with you. That is a massive benefit to the business.
The way to break in and get someone to see you, to get invited to the pitch, is to have some memorable Talk Trigger. You say there’s a 4-5-6 learning system in the book. Can you walk us through what that is and use the MailChimp example?
We put this learning system together. Many authors have written about word of mouth over the years. Certainly, it’s not a topic that’s new. We wanted to bring a little bit more structure to it to give business owners, companies and even individuals an actual framework for how you can make these Talk Triggers. Generally speaking, sometimes it just happened by accident in companies. We thought there’s got to be a better way for this, it’s so important. The 4-5-6 system wraps itself around a few elements. The 4 is the four mandates for a Talk Trigger, four things that must be true for something to be Talk Trigger worthy. There are five general types of Talk Triggers, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The 6 is the six-step system that you can use to build them, create them and deploy them.
[bctt tweet=”There’s always a moon shot happening somewhere in the tech world.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ll briefly go over the four. They’re a good place to start exploring Talk Triggers. The four mandates or musts for a Talk Trigger, number one, it must be remarkable by definition. It must be something worthy of talking about. No one talks about average. You don’t say, “Let me tell you about this perfectly adequate salad I had for lunch yesterday.” It’s not remarkable. It has to be a remarkable element in the customer experience or the sales experience. The second is it has to be relevant to the customer experience. Relevance is vital to the delivery and reception of the Talk Trigger by the consumer. If it’s out of left field, it feels almost like a gimmick or a stunt, and that’s not the best way to get people talking about us.
The third is it needs to be reasonable. By reasonable, we mean not over the top. If you go to any DoubleTree Hotel anywhere in the world and check-in, they give you a warm chocolate chip cookie that they baked in the hotel. 75,000 times every single day people get this cookie. It’s a reasonable gesture. People talk about that cookie. It’s a remarkable Talk Trigger for the simple thing that it is. It’s a cookie. It’s not a baby alpaca in your room that you can use while you’re at the hotel. It’s a cookie, but it’s relevant to the product experience. The fourth of the mandates is that it has to be repeatable. This is where we often get trapped. Sometimes we think about Talk Triggers being available to our VIP customers, our top customers and top 10%. If it’s something that isn’t available to every single customer every single time they interact with your product, it can cause dissonance. It can cause frustration and disappointment, which is the negative of word of mouth.
Imagine if I went to a DoubleTree and they’d run out of homemade warm chocolate chip cookies and I’ve been looking forward to that. I might be even angry as opposed to if I had no expectation of it, then that’s fine. If I’ve heard word of mouth and they’re out, it’s not good.
Just say, “I’m sorry, your room rate doesn’t include the cookie because it’s too cheap and you’re a bad person.” It creates this letdown, “Terms and conditions. While supplies last,” and all of that stuff is the enemy of word of mouth.
Don’t you see some of the airlines starting to do that? “That seat doesn’t let you have a free snack,” or whatever they’re doing now. Not only is it crowded but you do have to pay to put a bag in the overhead.
It’s almost like they’re paying someone to tell them how to make this experience worse. That’s what they’re hiring in consultants to do at this point, “Can you help us make this the worst experience for at least a small part of our customers?” We’ll talk briefly about MailChimp. I like this example because I’m a software guy myself. It’s often a little bit harder for us to imagine what you can do in a software environment that’s a Talk Trigger. If you’ve used MailChimp, you know their little chimp. It’s everywhere in the product. He is their mascot, he is their voice. He has a name. His name is Freddie, which a lot of people don’t know.
Freddie has a place in the product. When you submit an email to be sent through MailChimp, you get this big high five from Freddie. He says, “Good job.” He’s everywhere in the experience of the product. People talk about Freddie all the time. The reason it’s interesting is email software is the pits. It’s basically the airline of software. They’ve found a way with Freddie to make the experience better for you and because of that people talk about Freddie. I’m sure it has downstream benefits for them from a loyalty perspective and a lifetime value perspective, but most certainly from that Pre-Suasion perspective. If you’re looking for email software, HubSpot, Emma or MailChimp, some people may have an affinity right away for MailChimp.
[bctt tweet=”Never assume that everything is done. The work is never done.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We have an emotional connection almost like Colonel Sanders. There’s a person with the brand. Let’s go through those four Rs and how MailChimp is doing something remarkable. The fact that there’s a playful tone to the culture with this Freddie, you could say that makes them more remarkable than other email companies that don’t do it. Would that be fair?
That’s fair. SurveyMonkey also has a monkey as its mascot. It’s not used to the extent MailChimp uses Freddie. Freddie is in the product, as part of the product experience. From that perspective, it’s remarkable that they’ve done that.
It’s not a one-off, it’s integrated. It’s relevant because the concept of having a bunch of monkeys working for you in the background, it’s fun and it creates a visual image for me anyway.
Often, small business software is painful to use. Not only is it a relevant brand vision, but it’s also slightly better to use, which feels relevant to you at the moment.
It’s easy a monkey could do it maybe. It’s reasonable, it’s not over the top. It’s not this huge gorilla or something intimidating. Finally, it’s repeatable. That monkey’s there come rain or shine.
He gives you a little pellet award every single time you send an email.
That is remarkable to me because we know how our brains are wired. That’s why people keep playing Words With Friends or keep the addiction to the phone or gambling. It’s the, “I’ve got a little ding. I’ve got a little award.” To incorporate that into the software, to me, triggers the same addictive behavior in a good way.
On the Selectivor side, we are building a cute little dinosaur named Oliver. He’s going to have a lot of that same presence like Freddie does because it’s a little bit more fun to use.
Word Of Mouth: If it’s something that is not available to every single customer every single time they interact with your product, then it can cause dissonance, frustration, disappointment, and negative word of mouth.
Are there any tips besides buying the book that if someone’s saying, “I know I need a Talk Trigger and I understand the four steps of these Rs. What could I do? What’s my next step besides reading this book and seeing how other people are doing it?”
I may be biased but reading the book is helpful. Start looking for them in your everyday life. Think about your own experience in places and look for Talk Triggers because you start to see them in different ways and in different places. It’s fun to spot them that way. It’s educational for yourself because for the most part, almost all of them is in the category of, “Why didn’t I think of that first? That’s crazy. It’s so simple, it’s stupid.”
One of the things that you have in the book Talk Triggers is the six-step process for creating them. We’re not going to go into all six, but give us a little teaser. What’s the first step?
The first one is one almost no company does enough of, which is listening to your customers. We go into a meeting room, a conference room, we sit down and we say, “We need to build a viral campaign to launch our new water flavor.” What few people take time to do is to talk to customers, to get their opinion, to see how they use the product, and to talk to your customer service people about what are they hearing from customers. The first step in that six-step process is a listening tour. You go deep on the listening exercise. What you start to see are these little tiny gaps that you aren’t seeing in formal surveys, you’re not seeing in email feedback, but they are actual gaps where a Talk Trigger can fill.
[bctt tweet=”Word of mouth is much more powerful than any paid ad, commercial, and brand ambassadors. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I tell people all the time, “If you listen to what your customers are saying and put it in your marketing messages, then your potential customers feel like you’re inside their head.” The example of that is I was working with an architecture firm. They were trying to decide whether they wanted to hire me to come and give a talk and a workshop to them. They said, “The problem is we’re tired of coming in second. We’re not winning enough pitches.” I said, “I can help you with that.” Now, part of my whole pitch is, “Are you tired of coming in second?” and then people go, “We are.” That’s a great example.
It totally changed the entire conversation. If you’ve given people a reason to trust you, like you and want to do business with you, I know they understand where I’m coming from and that makes me feel good.
How can people follow you on social media?
It’s Daniel Lemin there on social media and TalkTriggers.com is where all of the other stuff is. We have a special little bonus for our audience. If you go to TalkTriggers.com/SuccessfulPitch, we’ve got a little download there. You can get the six-step process for free.
Thank you so much for being on. It’s exciting to watch you and Jay launch this book. It’s got a great alliteration, a great cover and great colors. How can it not be a hit? It’s going to be fantastic and entertaining at the same time.
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Links Mentioned:
- Daniel Lemin
- Selectivor
- Connected
- Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers With Word Of Mouth
- Jay Baer
- UberConference
- Postmodern Jukebox
- Daniel Lemin – Facebook
- TalkTriggers.com
- TalkTriggers.com/SuccessfulPitch
- Quantmre.com
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From On Air Anchor To Blockchain with Elsa Ramon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
One of the keys to success is authenticity. You can’t fake that, and Elsa Ramon has it. She exudes authenticity and effervescent energy on camera. Until recently, Elsa was the weekend evening anchor for CBS in Los Angeles. She made the big decision to leave that industry and her successful career and go out and start getting involved in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrencies. From on air anchor to blockchain, Elsa shares how she made that big decision, what her future goals are, and how you can embrace new technology and still use your old skills in this new world that’s being disrupted every day. She also shares some secrets of what makes a good story.
Listen To The Episode Here
From On Air Anchor To Blockchain with Elsa Ramon
Our guest is Elsa Ramon. She was recently the weekend evening anchor for CBS in Los Angeles. She is a five-time Emmy Award nominee for her excellence in reporting and anchoring. She has worked as an anchor reporter in places like San Antonio, Phoenix, and Dallas in addition to LA. She got her first job on air in Palm Springs. She graduated from UC Irvine with a BA in English Literature. One of her other important accomplishment is she’s the mother of two children, Bella at fourteen and Zev who is five. Elsa, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me. I love talking to you.
Your effervescent energy on camera, I’m fortunate enough to have had the chance to meet with you in person and it’s the same. One of the keys to your success is your authenticity. You can’t fake that. That is the key to one of your successes. The people that are reading to this are always interested in hearing people’s story of origin, their particular journey. You can jump in from when you were at UC Irvine or even go back further to when did you decide that you wanted to be on camera as an anchor?
It was when I was eleven years old. Before then, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I thought that was a fascinating career. I was the person that naturally wanted to help people, so I thought being a doctor would be cool. We were living in Austin, Texas at the time. My dad is from Austin, my mom is from LA. We had moved back to Austin and been living there for a couple of years. The woman who lived out on the street, Martha Cerna, I did not know she was a producer for a kid’s television news show that aired on the NBC affiliate in Austin called Kids World. I always found excuses to try to ride my bike past his house, come over, or try to rally all the kids on the street to go play over at Jacob’s house because I had a crush on her son.
Apparently she saw something while we were always over there playing that made her ask my parents if I would be allowed to come down to the TV station and audition for the new season of Kids World. My parents thought about it because my dad didn’t want me to do it. He thought I would get tangled up in this world of on air, things that he hears through the tabloids and all that stuff. My dad’s a real pragmatic guy, Navy, old-school, old-fashioned. He didn’t like the idea of me being in that spotlight and that exposure. My mom was totally opposite and said, “You should let her do this.” Ultimately, my mom won out. I went down to the NBC affiliate in Austin, KXAN, and auditioned.
They had twelve spots open. They were going to get six kid anchors and six kid reporters. That audition day, there was a ton of kids in there. Long story short, I made the cut. I was at eleven years old, shooting stories with a producer and sitting in the editing process and voicing over the pieces that she wrote and going on air with it and fronting it as a reporter at eleven. That was it. I changed what I wanted to do from that point on.
[bctt tweet=”Secret to a great story is the people in it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What a wonderful experience to find something you love and are good at, at such a young age, and then go from there. You’ve gone on to have such success, what do you think makes a good story? Whether you’re pitching to get a startup funded, pitching to get new clients to hire you or get customers for your business, storytelling is the key to that. Clearly to be a good reporter, and anchor, you know what a good story is. What do you look for when you’re deciding what stories to cover and how to make them memorable?
It comes down to the people who are in the story. You have a story. A lot of people might have the same story. It’s the people behind it that make all the difference. How have they learned from their story? How can we connect to them from what they’ve been through, what they experienced, and what they learned? How willing are they to let you in to learn? That’s the key. It’s vulnerability on both ends. It’s not just the person who is willing to sit down in front of the camera, take that leap and put their story out there. That takes a lot of courage, a lot of guts, and support. Whether it’s a good story, even a bad story, a story we learn from, they have to be vulnerable. They’re showing they are vulnerable by agreeing to be on camera with you and tell their story.
I never took that for granted because that takes a lot for people to make that decision. It takes vulnerability on my end too. I have to let the people know on the other end that they are being accepted and received and the trust that they’ve put in me, is not be taken for granted on my end either. I want them to know that I have the utmost respect and care for their feelings and their experiences because I’m human too. I have a story too, and there are a lot of things I can relate to as well. I want them to know that and feel that right away. It’s people. If you don’t have the people behind a pitch, a story, whatever it is to connect to and endear to, then I don’t think you have anything.
I love what you said. It could be the exact same story, but it’s the people that make it unique and compelling. I hear that from investors all the time that they’re investing in the team. Of course people, when they’re deciding who to buy or who to hire, they want to buy from people that they trust, like, and know. That’s what you’re gifted at, letting people get all that intimacy in a short amount of time in a segment. Would you share one of your favorite stories that you covered in your career? Whether it’s CBS or before?
I don’t know that this was my favorite. This was definitely not a favorite. It was a turning point, and extremely important in my career. I was at my first television job, my first on air job, I should say. It wasn’t my first TV job because before then I had spent about two years working as a production assistant and behind the scenes at KNBC in Los Angeles. I graduated from UC Irvine, I was an intern and I was lucky enough to be offered a position as a production assistant before I graduated from college. I had my foot in the door already. Production assistant ran scripts to the anchors and ran out and grabbed sound bites for the reporters. We were unpaid utility players. I was learning the ropes that way.
I did that behind the scenes before I got my first on-air job as an anchor reporter in Palm Springs in 1996. I had been at the job for a couple of months. Before then I was trying hard to learn the ropes. If you’re learning a sport, to play tennis or golf. When you’re first learning something, you’re concerned about the mechanics of it. Golf, head down, swing back, arms a certain way, stand a certain way and you’re so involved with the mechanics. That’s how I was at the beginning of my career on my first on-air job. I was concerned about the mechanics, the story, composition, beginning, middle, end, and best video first.
On Air Anchor To Blockchain: When you first are learning something, you’re concerned about the mechanics of it.
I was focused on that. I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture. I hadn’t learned yet that it was about the people, until there was this story of this woman who was coming into Palm Springs through the mountains on a motorcycle to come to a family reunion. She was a Harley rider and she was going to ride her motorcycle into Palm Springs to see the family. A lot of people cut through the mountain if they’re coming from Orange County, San Diego through to Palm Springs. She was on that mountainous trail and that mountainous road, she went off the side and was killed. She flew down about 500 feet or more. The family started to become concerned. They eventually found her, at first they became concerned. Where is she? She hasn’t shown up. She should be here by now. They couldn’t reach her.
We’d only had cell phones for a couple of years at that point and they couldn’t reach her on the cell phone. It started to become clear to them that something probably bad happened and they started retracing the steps, the path she would have taken. After calling the fire department, police, and everybody getting involved, they found her. They found the crash scene down 500 feet below. It was horrific. It was sad. It was a really hot summer day. The whole road was blocked off. Fire engines, paramedics, police officers, they were setting up a recovery effort to rappel down the mountain and recover her body. The whole family had come in from parts all over the country, they were all there on the side of the road.
The family reunion turned into this horrible tragedy and they were all there waiting for the fire department to bring up her body. They were all crying and bawling on the side of the road. It was terribly sad and so horrific and so heart-wrenching that I realized at that point that this is not about the mechanics of putting together a story. This is an entire family that’s been shattered by this tragedy. They were all in town for this wonderful time to reconnect with family members, to catch up with each other, take the pictures and talk about the time they had that great family reunion. Now, that was forever marked by her death.
The fact that they even talked to me while they were waiting on the side of the road through their tears, I was blown away that they gave me that trust and that honor in the middle of their tragedy. From that point on, I thought I will never take people’s pain or what they’d been through for granted. I hope to God people don’t have to go through something like this, but doing this for 21 years I’ve seen horrible things. I’ve also seen amazing things of the human spirit and how people come together and rally together when there’s been tragedy to help, to donate. We’ve seen it too as a country during 9/11. We’ve all seen it. During natural disasters and fires, we’ve all seen how people come together and donate money, time, food and clothes. That never ceases to amaze me every time there is something bad that happens. People come together, communities come together.
[bctt tweet=”Blockchain gives people freedom.” username=”John_Livesay”]
My big take away from that was when something is intense and emotional, the training wheels come off the bike riding of, “Am I doing this right? What’s the structure?” You’re in the moment and it’s a heartfelt connection because you trust that the skills are there. For the audience reading, when you’re giving a pitch or trying to get someone to hire you or trying to get a new customer, if you can get back to your purpose and your original reason for doing something, your authentic passion will come through. You can let go of wondering, “What am I supposed to say when this slide is up and did I say it perfectly or not?” and get in the zone. It sounds like that was a big turning point for you in your career. That’s a great example of that in action. More recently, you made the big decision to leave this incredibly successful career and become an entrepreneur in a whole new way. Tell us that story.
I never thought I would do that. This has been my life, my passion. I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been hard. It’s been rewarding. It’s been satisfying. It’s been gratifying. It’s like any job and career, it has its ups and downs, but it was my life. If somebody would have told me that someday, “You’ll leave it and branch out on your own,” there’s no way I would have ever believed that. I also don’t live with my head in the sand. I do realize that the business, after being in it for 21 years, is changing dramatically and I don’t necessarily think it’s for the better.
I also think our world is changing too and the way we operate, not just globally but in the United States. I recently had an opportunity to take a leap of faith and start working in the cryptocurrency, blockchain technology space. I can’t reveal yet exactly what I’m doing, but know that we are already working behind the scenes. This will be brought to light and to air eventually, and I’m excited about this progress and this project. It’s a breath of fresh air. I’ve got a shot of excitement, hope, and learning again. I feel like I did years ago where I’m a little scared, but I’m ready and I’m going to go forward with this.
It sounds that you’re definitely getting out of your comfort zone and getting into the learning zone.
When I say that the television and the news business is changing, I recently gave an interview and said it was a dying business. It’s dying in the sense in the form that we know it. The model that we know is dying with social media, the internet, and people are getting their news from many different outlets. It used to be my parents turned on the TV, they had several choices for their news, they picked one and that’s where they got their news, that or the newspaper or magazines. For immediate news, that was the model. That was it. That’s how it’s been done for decades, but it’s not that way anymore. I started seeing salaries getting cut back, the legacy anchors and journalists in markets like Los Angeles, all the big markets, we’re going backwards.
They’ve been asked over the last several contracts to not get raises but to get cut. I know personally of friends that I worked with who were asked to cut their salaries by up to 30% at their last contract negotiations. They’re in a position of, “I either take that or I don’t have a job at all.” It’s becoming leaner and less content. It’s less about content and quality in my opinion, and more about the shiny object over here. They’re doing what they can to try to hold on to their viewers, I get that. It’s a business. It is a business, butt’s such a struggle because many of us got into it to help people to make a difference, to change a few lives, and we can’t save the world alone.
We’re making a difference, one journalist at a time, I’d like to think. It was getting harder and harder to do that with more and more resources taken away, more and more people taken away. Money is becoming scarce and resources are becoming scarce, I knew that this is not right. It’s going backwards. I need to find something, another passion, because I felt like I was the last of the Mohicans. Even the generation before me might’ve been the last of the Mohicans, the legacy anchors that are there now. My fears were validated and confirmed when I was asked to re-sign my contract, which was great. It’s always nice to be renewed, but then they said, “No raise,“ flat.
On Air Anchor To Blockchain: We’re making a difference, one journalist at a time.
That was devastating to me because I had put in the first three years of that contract so much effort, so much time, so much passion, and so much commitment. I sacrificed a lot of time with my family and then to be told you’re not worth getting a raise and in fact, none of you are. That’s when I knew, “This is not a good situation. I’ve got to do something now.” I was lucky enough to meet some people who are deeply and heavily involved in the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology space and started learning, being enlightened, and here I am.
You are going to be able to take your passion for journalism, which is helping people. You are now figuring out ways that the blockchain stories that you might be exploring and covering could in fact help people, educate them and get them more comfortable with this new technology.
I will tell you the theme of the project we’re working on is freedom, and that is what cryptocurrency and blockchain technology will do. It’s going to give power back to the people, and I know that sounds cliché, but it’s going to be in a way that we have not experienced before here in the United States. We’ve all been lulled into this false sense of security with the way we live in our country. It’s about to be shaken up tremendously. Globally, this is already taking over. In small pockets it is taking over, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, in the United States too. We’re a long ways away, but we’re going to come a very long way in a short amount of time. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be helping people learn this new way of life, and this new way of operating in this new financial system, in the short amount of time.
[bctt tweet=”Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is going to give power back to the people.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The concept of freedom is certainly something that everyone is connected to. As you said, if you were used to doing something, everything from buying a house requires that you have to go through Escrow and the title, and all of those things could be changed. How do we know that a particular food is really organic? If it’s on the blockchain, that might change how we get that verification.
You hit the nail on the head. Everything as we know it is going to change with blockchain technology. The agriculture industry, the healthcare industry, the real estate industry. How we notarize documents, how we buy real estate, how we bank, how we use our money, where we use our money, it’s going to change. People might be wondering, how does journalism and this world of technology, of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, connect? I would say they’re a perfect match because as a journalist, our whole point was to right wrongs and to get some justice for people one story at a time if we can.
There’s nothing more satisfying than resolving something for people, getting them relief, or making them happy after a terrible situation that we could help fix. It’s the same with blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. This is going to right some wrongs. This is going to provide freedom to people who didn’t have it. This is going to provide identity to people who haven’t had one. It’s in line with what journalists want to do. This is exactly what blockchain technology and cryptocurrency is going to do.
You’re the perfect person to be the brand ambassador, to give everyday people the ability to understand what’s available, the inspiration to follow their dream, and shine a spotlight on this new technology in a way that’s accessible and not intimidating. It can embrace everyone and not just be for this select few who are tech experts.
On Air Anchor To Blockchain: There have been excellent articles written in the LA Times and other credible media about what the blockchain can and can’t do.
That’s another thing. We’re going to take away the fear that people might have and the mystery behind it is enough for people to say, “No, I don’t want to learn about it. I don’t care. This is what I know. I know fiat currency. I know money. I know dollars. This is how we live our lives. This is how our parents lived their lives. This is how our grandparents lived their lives.” At some point we all have to adapt and change, or it’s hard to get left behind. That’s with everything. We’ve seen that with cell phones, internet, and TVs. This is another adaptation that we’re going to have to accommodate. Eventually we’re all going to be on board with this. Right now is the time to learn. I feel the sooner everybody learns, the more freedom they’ll have.
Any last thought you want to leave us with either on your philosophy of life or your excitement about the blockchain?
I couldn’t be happier, feel more grateful, and lucky that I met the people that I have over the past year in this space to enlighten me and to encourage me to learn and grow. I feel like I’ve gone from zero to 60 in such a short amount of time. It’s just the beginning. It’s wonderful and I would encourage people to type in cryptocurrency in their search engines, type in blockchain technology, see what stories come up. There have been excellent articles written in the LA Times and other credible media about what the blockchain can and can’t do, the pros and cons of cryptocurrency, and the history of it. I would encourage people to do that, learn as much as they can and get involved now.
[bctt tweet=”Learn as much as they can and get involved now.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If people want to follow you on social media, your Twitter handle is @ElsaRamonOnAir, is that correct?
You will be able to find me on Twitter. Please stand by. I will be announcing on social media, Twitter too, when we are able to go public with what we’re doing. We are going to have an entire social media release and a space for people to go learn, engage, and reach out. I manage my accounts. I respond to everybody that I can. If I miss a few people, that is truly by accident. I really am that connected and I like to engage personally with people. Feel free to reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you.
What a gift you are to all of us. Thank you so much for being on the show, Elsa.
You are so welcome. Thank you for having me.
Links Mentioned:
- Elsa Ramon
- @ElsaRamonOnAir – Twitter Handle
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Exactly What To Say For Influence And Impact with Phil M. Jones
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Lots of people have a great idea, but they fail to have any understanding of who they want to bring that idea to or exactly who that perfect person might be in the first place. They sit, wish, wait, hope and pray for success as opposed to point themselves in a targeted, directed fashion with the right message towards the right person at the right time. Professional sales trainer and coach, Phil M. Jones, teaches on exactly what to say for influence and impact to close a sale. Phil entered the world of business at the tender age of fourteen. With nothing more than a bucket and sponge, he went from washing cars at weekends to hiring a fleet of friends working on his behalf, resulting in him earning more than his teachers by the time he was fifteen. His career went from strength to strength, as he worked with a host of Premier League Football Clubs to help them agree sponsorship and licensing agreements, to then being a key part of growing a £240M property business. Phil is now on a mission to demystify the sales process and bring simplicity and integrity to an industry where the only thing that seem to matter are short-term results with no thought for the impact on everyone involved.
Listen To The Episode Here
Exactly What To Say For Influence And Impact with Phil M. Jones
Our guest is Phil M. Jones. He’s the bestselling author of Exactly What To Say, Exactly How To Sell and Exactly Where To Start. He had his first business at fourteen years of age. He’s the youngest recipient of the British Excellence in Sales and Marketing Award. Over two million people across 57 different countries have benefited from his lessons and they know exactly what to say and when to say it. Let’s start learning from Phil. Welcome to the show.
It’s good to be here, John. Thanks for inviting me on.
You’re quite prolific to have two separate books. I always like to ask my guest to take us back to their own story of origin and it seems that for you, that might be fourteen years of age.
I’ve been in this game for quite some time. My first business was when I was fourteen years of age. I was knocking on the doors of my neighbors, asking them quite politely whether they wanted their cars washed. Some said yes, some said no. Most asked me how much money I would charge, which I quickly realized meant they were interested providing my prices were fair. I did okay with that little business, so much so that by the age of fifteen I was not going to school quite as often as I should. I remember getting invited in by the said school teachers questioning my attendance saying, “Phil, why don’t you come to school?” My response was simple. It was a question. It was, “Sir, do you mind me asking you a question?” He said, “Yes, sure.” I said, “How much money are you making?” The school teacher refused to tell me at the time, but at fifteen years of age my little car cleaning business was delivering me around £2,500 a month at that time, around $4,000 at that moment.
The reason I didn’t go to school is I had customers that needed servicing, staff that needed direction. I’ve always had this entrepreneurial gene in my body. I built a number of businesses through my teens. At eighteen, I had a dilemma. An offer on the table from one of the most prestigious universities, but I wanted to get my education in the field. The next few years had me working through some nice corporate roles. I was the youngest Sales Manager for a business called Debenhams Department Store. Head of Sales Training and Store Manager for one of the largest furniture retail groups called DFS Furniture Group, a former Head of Retail and Commercial Director for two Premier League soccer clubs. I went from there to build a property business that turned over £240 million at its peak.
In 2008, as the world started to change with this wonderful economic crisis that was going on at the time, what I was seeing was lots of lots of businesses that either we’re doing something good or good at doing something and failing to get the results I knew they were capable of. Struggling in that recession time because of the fact they couldn’t sell anything. What I started doing was delivering small sales training programs to help out the local business community. Ten people in a workshop became twenty people in a workshop, became 50 people in the workshop became, “Can you come deliver this to our sales force?” became big companies coming on board, became first book. Ten years on from now, I’ve written six bestselling books, spoken all around the world and still wondering when I’m going to figure it out what want to do.
The thing that jumps out when I was hearing you talk about your background for me is the soccer aspect of it. I’m curious, if there are any life lessons, do you look at the sales playing field like a soccer field? Are there any lessons from soccer that you apply in your talks and your workshops?
None whatsoever. The only thing I think about, and this is probably relevant to a pitching point of view is when you study those that have been super successful in the world of any sport and then in particular soccer is those who have achieved the best of the best always have ratios attached to their numbers. An example of which is a guy called Alan Shearer, one of the greatest Premier League soccer players of all time. He’s won the Golden Boot, as in most goals scored in the season, more times than anybody else. In his best ever season, his shots to goals ratio was 10:1. Lots of people we meet in the world of sales or when they’re pitching things are saying things like, “I tried three times, it didn’t work out. I tried five times, it didn’t work out.”
[bctt tweet=”Enthusiasm is a catalyst toward decisions” username=”John_Livesay”]
The best of the best of the best have to try ten times to try to get one goal. Better than that also is what did Alan Shearer need to be able to do to score, what he needed to be to be able to take shots, he needed the ball. In the world of sales, our ball is our prospect list, and it’s who we are pitching towards. Lots of people have a great idea, but they fail to have any understanding of who they want to bring that idea to or exactly who that perfect person might be in the first place. They sit, wish, wait, hope and pray for success as opposed to point themselves in a targeted, directed fashion with the right message towards the right person at the right time.
I love that concept of measurement and it’s not just to have a goal, but it’s how many sales calls are you making? How many of these are your closing? Which helps get people’s mindset wrapped around not burning out? If you realize it’s going to take one out of ten shots in sports and it’s going to take one out of ten maybe in what you’re selling to get the yes, then it helps people realize, “I’m only an eight so I have to keep going.” That mindset of an athlete and the mindset of a sales athlete are important and you certainly have that down. Let’s jump in because you not only have one but two books out and another one on the way.
The new one is finished and it launches in October 2018. That one comes together and brings the trilogy to complete.
I’m going to ask you if someone is saying to themselves, “Do I want to start with What To Say or do I want to start with How To Sell? Where would you have them start first?
The third book is probably important to be able to bring into play here, which is called Exactly Where To Start. If you’re wondering where to start, that may well be the place. Let’s look at what all three of them are. Exactly Where To Start is a book to how to turn your big idea into reality. If you sat there thinking, “I’ve got this great product idea, this great service idea. I’ve got something I want to launch as a new arm to my business,” getting that blueprint for success right in the first place is more important than saying, “How do I drive it fast?” Take that race car analogy is, “Before you learn to drive the race car, you need to have a race car.” Building something that works on paper, getting an idea launched and out the ground is probably the place to start if you don’t have an existing business.
If you have an existing business in place, you can probably look at this either way around. For people finding my work the first time, the way in which they’re written is probably the best order. Read Exactly What To Say because it gives you some instant wins, some quick takeaways, but if you read it and you read it right, you’re going to be like, “That was super smart and it was crammed into a short read and it was something that was no fluff, but there was no backup to it.” There was nothing like, “Here are all the articles, all the investigations and all the experience as to why these things are true.” It’s jus, “This is true. Do this. This is how it works.”
For people that then want to back that up with some more sales psychology, they want to back it up with some more understanding of still straight talking principles, then read Exactly How To Sell. If you feel you know nothing about the sales process first time round, then flip those two around, start with Exactly How To Sell, understand the principles of sales and then Exactly What To Say becomes the sprinkling on the top of the cake that says, “How do I make the system run faster?”
Let’s start with Exactly What To Say and it’s the magic words for influence and impact. Who doesn’t want some magic words? One of the big things that a lot of people struggle with is realizing that there are two types of people that you talk about. You talk about this person that’s a professional mind maker upper and that some people as you talk about here leave their professional success in the hands of others. There are some people who judge something before they’ve even tried it. This constant awareness of who you’re talking to and should people adjust the words that they’re saying based on who they’re talking to is my question?
We should adjust the words that we’re saying depending upon the outcome that we want to achieve. When I talk in terms of the outcome that we want to achieve, it might not necessarily be the final outcome. This is a mistake that lots of people make when they’re trying to pitch something is they want to get from A to Z. In a conversation, even if it is a one-sided conversation in the form of a one-way communicative pitch, it still needs landing points and checkpoints to say, “What I want to do is I want to provide this piece of evidence and then this piece of evidence,” where the sum of all those pieces evidence mean, “Of course, they’re going to choose me. Of course, they’re going to do what I ask.” John, you know friends who have invited somebody to marry them? On a scale of one to ten, with ten being somewhere near certain and one being, “I don’t know whether she’s going to say yes,” where do you think most of those people are on that sliding scale of one to ten when they ask the question, “Will you marry me?”
I would say nine and a half. Everyone I know, male or female, depending on who’s doing the asking because we live in a whole different world now, that you’re 95% sure you’re going to get a yes when you went and ask the question, especially in front of a bunch of people.
Somewhere near certain, maybe a niggle of doubt in the back of your mind, but you’re somewhere near certain. What we should be looking to do is to find that same level of certainty before we invite somebody to invest in our idea, buy into our product or service, to be able to move forward with us in a long-term relationship. That same level of certainty should come before the big ask. That’s what we should be looking to be able to do with the evidence that we build through our pitches.
One of the phrases you have in Exactly What To Say is, “I bet you’re like me,” and that phrase allows people to get from being on opposite sides of the table to being on the same side of the table, if not physically at least psychologically because you’re building rapport with that phrase. Would you agree with that?
What To Say For Influence And Impact: Find a way to get anybody to agree with anything you say.
What you’re looking to be able to do is you’re looking to find a way to get anybody to agree with anything you say. Providing you’re reasonable, if you say, “I bet you’re a bit like me,” and then follow that up with a reasonable set of circumstances, you can gain a piece of evidence. “I bet you’re a bit like me, you like to work with a local organization and you far rather prefer to support local, homegrown talent than you would to work with somebody from the other side of the country or the other side of the world.” If what I’m going to do is to present the fact that we’re a local company, I’ve already got the evidence and the agreement, the fact that given the choice they would prefer to work with a local company.
One of the mistakes I see people making often when they give a pitch to get a new client or even get a pitch to get their startup fund it is not planning a good closing. You and I are both keynote speakers so we know how important a good opening and closing is. Most people think, “I’ll just end my presentation or my pitch with, ‘Do you have any questions?” I cringe every time I hear that. You at least have given them a new way to phrase, “If you’re going to ask for questions,” whenever. “What questions do you have for me?” which implies you’ve got to have something there.
It’s more than that as well. If I finish a presentation with the words, “Do you have any questions?” the undertone and psychology is I expected you to have questions. If I say to you, “Do you have any questions?” and you don’t have any questions, a little voice inside of the head says, “What did I miss? What have I not caught here?” It’s an activist, a catalyst, a breeding ground for objections like, “I need some time to think about it.” What you’ve done is you’ve suggested to them that they should have had questions to ask. You’ve told them you don’t believe you’ve given them enough information to make a decision, if you’re saying, “Do you have any questions?” Rephrase that to, “What questions have you got for me?” What you’ve got is you’ve created path of least resistance is for them to come back and say, “No questions.”
If they say, “No questions,” it means they’ve got enough information to make a decision, which means that you’re welcome to ask them for the decision. If you’re looking to be able to invite somebody to take the next step, then that’s all we need to do, is to invite them to take the next step. A close in a pitch environment isn’t this big, “Shall we go for it?” It’s inviting them to take an action that they could only take, had they decided they were going to go for it. It’s an invitation formula to take the next step.
Let’s jump into the other great book, Exactly How To Sell, which is a sales guide for non-sales professionals. If I may be so bold, everyone who is a sales professional should also read this because part of being a good salesperson is like an athlete or an actor is keeping up on your training and skill set. Even if you think you don’t need this, I would like to invite all the readers to reconsider that and say, “I think I might.” The thing that jumped out at me having had a sales career for many decades is where you talk about making the moments count. There’s a lot of great things out there about instead of eating a bagel or a muffin, eat this. Instead of eating pizza, eat this. You’ve done it in the way of talking about the problems. My whole philosophy is the better you can explain the problem to a client, the better they think you have the solution. You do a deep dive into four or five things that we should say instead of this. Instead of saying if, what should I say?
Instead of saying if, if you say the word when, then what you do is you create a vivid image. Think about the example. If I’m to say to you right now, “If you’re not careful, the cup of coffee in front of you is going to fall all over your keyboard.” Your little voice inside your head’s going to say, “It won’t fall. I’m careful.” If I say, “When you turn around too quickly, you’re going to knock that coffee cup, it’s going to ruin your keyboard.” You cannot help but see a visual image of your keyboard covered in coffee, which means that if I can say, “Here’s a mug with a lid on it,” that means that when you knock it over, it doesn’t spill on the keyboard, you’re more likely to be able to move forward with it.
[bctt tweet=”Show Me Your Know Me” username=”John_Livesay”]
The takeaway there is using the word when paints a picture. The word ‘but’ comes up a lot. “Can you do this for us?” “Yes, but,” and your whole philosophy is replacing the word but much like they do with improv with the word and.
What we do is we now create something where all things are true as opposed to negating the thing that was said prior to it. If I’m in a conversation with somebody and I say, “I hear what you’re saying. I agree with the points that you’re making but,” the second I’ve said the word but, what I’ve said is, “Everything you’ve just said is not true.” If you’re saying, “I hear what you’re saying, and I agree with the things that you’re pointing out to me and we’re both in agreement with this and the most important thing is,” then what I can do is shift the conversation and bring everybody with me.
Here’s a big one. It’s always shocking to me when the client will say, “How much does this cost?” We have the ability to reframe that with a different phrase, which you would say would be?
I would swap the word cost for investment. Let’s think about this with some pain, is four letter C words are typically not good to use. How do you feel about the cost in your life? A cost is a bad thing. If you understand what costs are, it’s money out and nothing back. A cost brings zero returns. If we were say in any other set of circumstances, “It costs me,” we would be describing a bad set of circumstances. It was something that left a pain on us. The thing that we’re looking to better provide to them, whether it is some form of involvement into funding a startup, whether it is them buying into a product or service. I’m guessing that thing is going to bring some returns. If that thing is going to bring some returns, it isn’t a cost, it’s an investment. We label it the right way around. The money is easier to spend. It’s easier to spend money on an investment than it is to spend money on a cost.
We’re having a collaborative conversation, they’re on the right track and they say, “When we are working together, X, Y and Z is going to happen,” and your suggestion is instead of saying the word we, we should say, you.
We should say you. We should swap everything that is we focused to you. Let me give you the biggest example of this in the world. In every proposal, every pitch document, every company website that I see, more often than not, what I see is, “We this, We that, We the other.” “We pride ourselves on our customer service. We founded in 2004. We have an experienced team of professionals,” you quite literally we all over your customers. Flip that thing around and what we should be saying is, “Choosing us means that You benefit from over 40 years of experience. What you find from being a customer of ours means that You get the benefit of being able to plug into this, this, and this.” Instead of it we, we, we, it’s choosing us so you. What we also do is we activate the sentence. We put them in possession of the service or the product that we have in their mind’s eye, which means that we move it from a future conditional tense and we bring it towards being an active and current tense.
Some people would be like, “Yes, we know we’re expensive but,” there are two noes there. Let’s say, “Yes, we know we’re expensive,” how would you suggest people reframe that?
Before I jump into the reframing, answer me this question. Do you like expensive things?
No.
I would also challenge that sometimes I believe that would be true.
I like them, I don’t know that I can afford them or want to spend. I’d like to have an expensive car.
Expensive restaurants, suits, shoes, watch, jewelry. In many sets of circumstances, the word expensive is something we’re remarkably proud of. Where it is in scenarios that we’re proud of is when we’re talking about a premium offering. If we swap the word expensive for premium, what we end up doing is we talked to the right side of the brain that considers expensive a good thing as opposed to expensive a bad thing. What is it that truly makes something expensive? The only thing that makes something expensive in my mind is what it’s being compared to. Is a Rolls Royce expensive? Not if you’re shopping for a Bugatti Veyron, it’s not. Until you can find a comparison, the label of expensive is only in relation to what it’s being compared to. If their first offering is the fact that this is an expensive product, we can reframe that it’s a premium offering. What we’ve done is we’ve then allowed them to be able to judge this as not do they or don’t they want the offering, it’s can they or can’t they afford it. That’s a different thing.
What To Say For Influence And Impact: It’s easier to spend money on an investment than it is to spend money on a cost.
When somebody sees something as expensive and the problem is that they cannot afford it, there’s not a great deal that we can do to change that. If you’re looking for $2 million worth of funding and somebody could only put $50,000 in and that’s all they have as disposable liquidity, I don’t care how good your pitch is. Somebody doesn’t have the means to be able to pay, then the game is unfortunately over and it may well be too expensive. However, what we’re looking to do is to build a premium offering, we’re building a premium company, we want to bring on board premium people. All of a sudden that requires a premium level of investment.
On the flip side of expensive is cheap. I don’t think anybody ever usually refers to their offering as cheap. However, the client might say, “We’re looking for the cheapest solution.”
Client says, “Have you got anything cheaper?” Sometimes though, even sales professionals in organizations say, “I have got something here for you. It’s a little cheaper.” The trouble is there would never be an ad agency that was putting a campaign together that used the word cheap in any of the slogans for a company. It’s not going to be the thing that reinforces a conversation the way that we would look for. People do talk about things like budget. Budget would be a way of being able to say it’s a budget offering, but I don’t like that on a personal level. What budget says when you think about the real meaning of the word is that’s the sum of money that’s been allocated towards spending on this. That isn’t what we’re looking to better create as a label on this. We could say that it’s a basic offering because what it is, is without all the bells, whistles and the frills or we could say it’s a value offering.
That gives you what you need, so you’re getting maximum value. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, that’s just for you. A lot of people are always saying, “The problem we see out in the marketplace that we’d like to solve is this.” What’s your pain point? All those kinds of phrases, it’s too direct. It’s not conversational.
How could you ever answer that question? If somebody says, “What’s your pain point?” Put yourself on the receiving end of it or, “Talk to me about your problems. Why don’t we sit down and talk about your problems?” You’re like, “Screw you. I don’t want to talk about my problems.” In fact, if you ask somebody to describe your problems, you’re going to win about as many friends than saying that somebody has an ugly baby. It’s not going to play out well. What a problem is is a head to head conversation.
Think about the definition of a problem, is about you saying, “I can solve this. You’ve got this,” and then the other person has to wholeheartedly own up to the fact that this problem is all on them and that you are the Holy Grail and the Savior. That’s a big ask on both sides of that conversation. Flip the word problem for the word challenge, now it’s not head-to-head, it’s side–by-side. This becomes something that we can overcome in partnership, in collaboration together, which can have some long-term success where both parties can admit to indifference. Both parties can admit to the fact they’ve got imperfections and both parties can move forward, collaboratively together merely by swapping the word problem for challenge.
The final one is when you say to somebody, “When I sell you this car, when I sell you this product, when I sell you X, Y and Z, you’re going to be happy,” or whatever their promise is.
This is a general shift in everything. You’ll see undertones of this through all the examples that we’ve talked about. We should be shifting when I sell to when you want. When you create that same thing we talked about earlier where instead of creating a future conditional set of circumstances, we create an active, current set of circumstances. What we’re also doing is we’re removing all of the We, we’re shifting into the You. What we shouldn’t be saying is, “When I get your investment, what I’m going to do is this,” it’s, “When you choose to invest, what you’re going to find is it’s going to allow us to be able to do this, which means that what you’re going to then have is a closer step towards this, which then means that what we can do.”
We’re shifting the entire interest into talk about their interests and not yours. In every conversation that you’re looking to have, we’re going to create freedom. It’s not black and white. We’re looking to be able to enjoy the shade of gray in the middthe le. We’re looking to allow the other persons of color in between the lines, yet we formulate the lines. The feeling, the undertone in the other person throughout the entire conversation is, “Show me that you know me.”
[bctt tweet=”We vs You” username=”John_Livesay”]
The biggest challenge I see salespeople having is closing the sale. The reason they can’t close the sale, usually it’s because they can’t overcome the objections. You tackle this in your chapter about how to negotiate like a pro and overcome these objections. What I want to double click on, Phil, is dramatize your idea as a way to negotiate like a pro. Can you explain that for us?
People like big ideas. Enthusiasm itself is a catalyst towards decision. If you cannot bring the outcome that you were looking for somebody to move towards or away from, to a position that is larger than life, yet still unbelievably true, then the chances of you moving that person towards that thing remain into the realms of being rational and being made under the purpose of logic. We all know that the majority of decisions are made on emotion over logic. Emotion always comes first. Something has to feel right before it ever makes sense.
When it comes to whatever our idea is that we’re looking for somebody to be able to move towards, then what we need to do is we need to bring the noise to it. We need to make it into a full feature length production. The dramatization needs to be the very best version of reality. I’m not saying tell lies. I’m not saying to be able to bring in any mistruths. I’m saying what we should be able to do is to polish the truth in the finest possible ways so that the thing we’re asking somebody to move towards or away from is something they’re excited about. They feel enthused about. They feel like a catalyst that kicked off and it’s the thing they want to be a part of.
Exactly What to Say: The Magic Words for Influence and Impact
You talked about if you want different results and to be seen different from your competition, which is important that other not in this commodity space, that the real secret to all of it is we all have to start behaving differently. That is such a great way to end your philosophy and this episode. I’m going to ask you if people are like, “I get it, Phil. I need to behave differently,” is there one thing besides buying your books Exactly What To Say, Exactly How To Sell that they should be doing to behave differently?
They need to look at everything from the viewpoint of the consumer and say, “What am I doing to create an experience here that is demonstrably different?” If they want to take one point in time that they can do something that is demonstrably different, it’s the moment in time that is before the consumer gets to be the consumer. It’s the moment before the moment. If you are meeting somebody as a prospect for the very first time and you’re looking to be able to pitch to them, what can you make happen before you get into that first meeting? That would be the number one biggest takeaway that could influence your conversion rates in first meeting is to say, “What can I do to start the meeting before the first meeting happens to give me a fair advantage ahead of everybody else?” That means I shift the start line further forward by starting the relationship with the other person way before everybody else.
You’d go into all kinds of examples on how to do that, whether it’s reaching out on social media or something like that. If anybody wants to hire you, obviously, you’re hugely successful as a speaker. I definitely want to recommend that, but as far as following you on social media so we’d know when to buy your next book?
PhilMJones.com, from the site there you can splinter out to any one of the social channels. I’m pretty active across all of the major platforms. You can plug into the blog. There are loads of free content. You can stay up-to-date with some of my movements. I’d be delighted to hear from anybody that’s taken something from the interview, chose to put it into action and found a way of making it work for them.
Thanks so much for being on the show, Phil.
Thanks for inviting me. It’s great to be here.
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