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Episode Overview
Think your business is too weird to sell to corporates? You could very well be more wrong than you think. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why people don't try to sell to corporate which could rather be described as excuses.
But - you don't know what you don't know - so tune in the Personal Brand Entrepreneur Show this week, meet Jess Lorimer and discover how you might be able to uncover a whole new world of opportunity for your business.
About Jess..
Jess Lorimer is one of the UK's leading experts on B2B sales. Having spent her corporate career developing sales teams in over 10 disciplines, Jess set up her own sales training consultancy in 2014. With customers in over 17 countries, her proven, practical and simple B2B sales techniques and processes have been responsible for building some of the best sales teams around the world and helping entrepreneurs sell services successfully and easily into the world's biggest brand organisations.
Jess online : https://selltocorporates.com/
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Welcome to Amplify the Personal Brand Entrepreneur Show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Jess Lauremer.
The chances are if you are selling something that nobody else ever thought of, it's not needed and it's not wanted, and there's not been an adequate way of expressing the pain points or transformations to make someone want to buy. It selling in a saturated market, for example, like Photocopies, where you already know there's a clear need, there are clear transformations, clear people to target. That is easy because what you're talking about there is you are having to take clients that are potentially already buying from somebody else. But they're buying, right? That's the key word. They are already buying. They already need that thing.
Hi there and welcome back to Amplify the Personal Brand Entrepreneurship. My name is Bob Gentle and every week I'm joined by amazing people who share what makes their business work. If you've just hit play, then while you still have the app open, hit the subscribe button. And if you're on iPhone, then it's the plus icon or the follow button. That way you won't miss a thing every week when I drop new episodes. Now, before I jump into introducing this week's guest, just a quick reminder that after nearly 200 of these interviews, I've learned a thing or two about what makes business work online. And it turns out success leaves clues. So I want to offer you that map. If you jump onto my website, you can grab your copy of the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's everything you need to start scale or just fix your personal brand business. So, New Year. New year. Am I right? Most people, when they set new goals for the business, they focus on sales goals and some businesses focus on scaling in the consumer market. But for many people this year it's the corporate space which holds the most promise.
And with the so called great resignation and many more people than ever joining the ranks of the gloriously unemployable and that's the committed self employed, there are a lot of people thrown into having to kill what they eat. Pardon me for the terrible analogy. For the first time, I guess it is what it is. So who could I possibly have on the show to help you get set for your best sales year ever? Or possibly for many of you, your first sales year ever. Jess Laura Mer, welcome to the show.
I am very excited to be back. It's very exciting for me to get invited back to things and it means that I made an okay enough impression the first time. So thank you for having me and validating that.
Well, I think for many people in my circle, you are sort of the sales guru. There are lots of people who focus on selling at scale. There are lots of people who focus on things like summits and challenges and all of these things that people like you and I are used to hearing about. But what you don't hear about very much is the very important job of actually selling in person the way that it's been done for a couple of hundred years. And for me, you are the person who really embodies excellence in that, which is why I really want to speak to you have been on before and, yeah, you did a good job. So welcome back.
Well, it's nice to be back. And it's one of those things. I think for me, it's really important this year more than ever, that people understand that sales is an almost lifelong journey, really, and a lifelong education piece. And I think that there is a temptation in the online world to think that you just learned to sell one thing or that you just learned to sell in one way and then off you go and everything's fine. And probably the biggest learning of the pandemic for a lot of people was that the things that they had been doing previously suddenly weren't working. And that's I don't know about you, but that's what I saw a lot of over 2020 and certainly into 2021. And I think that created a lot of frustration for people who felt that they spent a lot of time learning how to be good at marketing and implement processes in their business and things, and suddenly they'd mastered this sales skill that they had and then overnight felt like it didn't work. And I know that we're going to touch on some of the things that you can do differently now, but I think that whilst the landscape has changed, it is also important for everybody to remember good salespeople are not good salespeople because they're supremely, naturally talented.
They're good at it because they practice it regularly. And I think that goes a long way in this market.
So there are a few places I could go from that. The first question I will ask you is my friend Neil, who was a policeman for many years, calls the Daft Lady question, can anybody get good at sales?
Yes, absolutely. It's interesting, isn't it? Because like anything, sales is a skill. And I think it's unfortunate in today's society that we've forgotten how much being good at something actually relies on developing a skill rather than being naturally gifted. Even doctors, you can look at the best surgeons in the world. And was it Thomas Edison who said, Everyone knows that it's 1% talent and 99% sweat or something? He actually said it far more eloquently than I just did. So please don't ever paraphrase that in that kind of way. But anyone can learn how to be a sales person. And I think that what we also have to remember when we set up a business, it is our primary job to be a salesperson. And that's where a lot of certainly small businesses or new businesses go wrong, is that they think that the primary job is to be the best person at creating content around their topic of expertise, or their primary job is to excel in terms of client delivery, which obviously is incredibly imperatively important. But your primary function to make your business a business and not just an expensive hobby is to sell and is to become a salesperson.
That's a very learned skill. It's something that comes with practice, and it's something that has to be consistently honed. Whichever medium you choose to sell through, whether that's email marketing or on the phone calls calling in person, doesn't matter. It's got to be practiced regularly for you to stay at the top of your game with it.
So I would like to invite you to pop a bubble with me. And it's a bubble that I see a lot of business owners nicely bouncing around inside. And this is even people, professional sales people, and that is that marketing can be an excuse for not having to do the hard stuff. I see a lot of people and I've been invited on to podcasts to talk about scaling in particular sometimes. And I'm asked the question, how can we scale our sales? And I have to come back to the question, well, are you selling anything right now? Because if you can't sell anything, how are you possibly going to scale before you can scale any kind of sales? It doesn't matter if it's email or selling from the stage, what I'll call stages rather than the stage. You're going to have to be good at taking somebody on a journey that starts from relationship through to asking a difficult question. What the bubble is that I'm inviting you to pop is the bubble that most business owners I see are quite comfortable in, which is if I could just do enough marketing, people will come and buy my stuff without me having to offer anything, without me having to ask the difficult questions, without me having to make myself vulnerable or humble.
You know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about selling.
Of course, and it's actually interesting. It's an interesting bubble, and it's one that I talk about with clients and certainly prospective clients a lot, because nobody wants to sell. Nobody particularly enjoys selling. Unless you're a big old sales nerd like me. People will avoid asking or saying, do you want to buy this? Because it is a challenging or it feels like a challenging conversation to have because of the rejection that is perceived as being imminent. And the thing that I always say to people is marketing and sales are entirely separate things. They have entirely separate purposes. However, the synergy between them, as I think it was quoted in a Harry Potter book, one cannot live without the other, actually not Harry Potter quote, because obviously Harry Potter, for anyone that cares, the quote was one cannot live while the other survives. But marketing sales complete opposite of that. They have to coexist and they create this never ending circle, essentially. So if we look at the jobs or the purposes that they actually have, marketing for most people is designed to give them leads. As we all know, in order to make a sale, you have to have eyes on an offer, and specifically the right eyes on the right offer for them.
And that's what makes the sale. Doesn't matter how else you do it. Those are the two things you need. So if we understand that marketing and the purpose of marketing is to bring you the right eyes, what we have to understand from a sales perspective is that our job is to show up and help those right eyes make a decision about the right offer for them and to help bring them to a conclusion.
So I understand exactly what you're saying there. And one of the ways that I explain this to clients is that marketing is a little bit like cultivating the ground before harvest. And the sales is really the harvest itself. You can't have one without the other. But in most businesses, if they have an issue, it's either going to be there's nobody preparing the ground, there's, nobody nurturing the crop, or they have a sales issue where they're just letting the crop wither on the vine because it can be quite challenging. The kind of person that you just described, hopefully if the recording worked properly, was where they've taken a real step backwards into just being a huntergatherer. They see a dinosaur on the horizon and they exploit it and they jump in and they try and kill it quickly. Nobody comes out of that looking good. It's just not the way to go about things.
I think it's quite a challenge as well, because most people, I don't think anybody sets out to give a bad sales experience. And I think actually a lot of people worry so much about selling that they inadvertently make the experience awkward and make it feel uncomfortable for both themselves and the customer. And, you know, I think what's interesting to watch is that so many people go one of two ways. Either they'll be incredibly worried about giving a poor sales experience and coming across as being sleazy and pushy and giving the hard sell that they refuse to sell. So they'll sit, like you say, in that preparation for harvest mode, and they'll only do their marketing and they won't convert the relationship in any way, shape or form because they would rather somebody said to them, I really want to buy something. I'm going to make this decision. I'm going to absolve you of all responsibility almost for any kind of impact on that decision. Or you get the people who inadvertently go the other way and they're so keen to avoid the pushy, hard sell that they actually become that, and they feel like it's more transparent.
So they'll sit and go.
Do you want this? Do you want this? Do you want this? Do you want this?
And they won't actually necessarily listen to what the prospect is saying to them. So they won't hear what the real problems are or what the real transformation needs to be. And in that end, they continue to push the wrong offer because it's almost like a nervous, adrenaline fueled decision, if that makes sense. And that's what we typically see in sales. And unfortunately, because most people set out to want to give good sales experiences and in the online space, certainly people talk a lot about building relationships. One of the things that we have to realize about building relationships is that relationships are designed to be mutually beneficial, and that's the bit that we don't discuss enough. So if you're showing up, producing content for your audience week after week after week after week, and you are never, ever offering them the opportunity to buy from you, to sustain that content, to sustain their own learning, development and growth, then actually, you're not being part of a mutually beneficial relationship. You're being or you're contributing to a relationship where you overgive and then feel resentful because you are not rewarded in any way, shape or form.
So when you're working with clients, they've kind of made the decision once we've got past your sales process and they are a client, they've made the decision they're going to sell to corporate. What are the most common mindset blockers that you find in them?
It's an interesting one. So the people that I tend to work with are people who are incredibly good at what they do, so they are proficient to a level of qualification. I typically see lots of health and wellness practitioners, for example. So people who've qualified as nutritionists or fertility experts or menopause experts or whatever, and people who have worked in professional environments within their area of expertise. So project management professionals or program management professionals, people who work in operations, marketing, et cetera. And so it's interesting because you would think that those people, through virtue of having a qualification, would feel qualified. But actually one of the biggest mindset blocks that we see people coming to us with is around why would a big company buy from little old me? That's very typical. Why would a big corporate buy from a small business or buy from a soloprene? So we see that quite a lot. We also see things like, would they really pay me for that? Will corporate really give me money for this particular skill? Information education? So that's quite common. And I think the other big one is do corporates really prioritize what I'm trying to sell?
And we see that again, cropping up, most commonly in wellness professionals or practitioners who can get very caught up in stereotypically. Corporates have only invested in profit building areas and revenue generating areas. And that's not true, and it's not the case, and it's certainly not the case any longer, but it's a common thing that people question or use to keep themselves stuck essentially, and stop themselves building that corporate revenue stream because they're afraid it's going to lead to more rejection.
So this was actually something that I've been thinking about in the introduction was you speak about these sort of these obvious people for selling into corporate. But then there are these very nonobvious things like the wellness professionals. They're on the periphery of that. But if you extend that into things like confidence, coaching or I have a friend who runs a business doing laughter, yoga. These are slightly wacky things. Let's maybe look at what's the wackiest thing? What's the wackiest thing you've seen being successfully selling to corporate?
Do you know what? In the last twelve months alone, I've seen quite a few different ones. So I've got a martial arts practitioner who is selling Marshall Arts like classes and coaching to organizations to increase performance. So that's quite an interesting one because it's not something that I've seen before. I've got people who work in play and play therapy, which is very interesting. I've got people who work in those health and wellness areas, so I mentioned a few. There fertility, menopause, women's health, men's health, those kinds of areas. Sleep consulting, that's a big one. And mental health. And then we have things like people dealing with imposter syndrome and empowerment and speaking. So not necessarily speaking as in speaking up in boardrooms and meetings and things, but dealing with a virtual environment. So confidence when speaking on video for people who previously didn't have to and were perfectly happy and confident speaking anywhere else. So we're seeing quite a lot of interesting things in the market, and it's a really cool place to be.
So to use. What I think is Norman Schwarzkoff. No, I can't remember his name, but it was this whole thing of there are no knowns and unknown unknowns. When you're selling to corporate for the first time, you have no idea what the process is. Is it a straightforward process? Is there a convoluted buying chain? What's the decision making process am I going to have to produce contracts and agreements? There's an awful lot of unknowns around, for sure.
And I also think that just like everything to do with sales, there's always somebody who's done it, and it's been awful. And I always liken this, too. I'm going to use a horrific example if you have to bear with me. But pregnancy. I'm 32 and a lot of my friends are having babies or have had babies, and people will insist on telling me their pregnancy stories, and I do not appreciate it. I tell all my friends I'm like, the worst, most squeamish person to talk to about it. I don't know anything about babies, and it's not a process that I am particularly willing to go through. However, what I've learned from my friends who are pregnant or who have been pregnant is that every time somebody talks to them about pregnancy, they've got the worst story ever. So they weren't just pregnant. Like they were pregnant. Everything went horrifically wrong. Like, and it's the same with corporate sales and the same with any kind of sales, really. You will always meet somebody who will tell you that they had a corporate client and they didn't sign contracts and then they didn't pay them. And then it was awful.
And DA DA, DA, DA, DA. You just do. There's always going to be that person. And I would always say that you have to take anything with a pinch of salt because one party will always remember things quite differently from another party. And it also depends on how that person actually set the sale up and how they navigated things like client boundaries and how they actually set out their sales process, whether they even had a sales process or whether it was just a kind of handshake. And yeah, cool, we'll pay you that. But nothing's in writing and nobody's got T's and C's. So actually, it's not a real thing. So I think we always have to be aware that when we're talking to people about their experiences, they might have some incredibly valid and difficult experiences, but that might come through a result of some of the things that they've also contributed to that experience. So we always have to look at that in terms of the actual process of selling to corporate. So I developed a framework quite a few years ago now, and if you've heard it before, I'm sorry, because it's not the most exciting framework in the world.
It's what we're here for.
Well, I'll try and jazz it up. I'll do jazz hands whilst I say it or something.
I knew we should be doing video.
Yeah, that would've been great. Engagement on it would have been phenomenal. So when we're looking at selling to a corporate company, what we're actually doing is moving a stakeholder through five parts of the process, and they are only involved with four parts. You are involved with the first and you only. So the first part of the framework is clarity. Selling to corporate organizations or anybody else involves a level of understanding around who you are selling to and what you are selling in them. Now, I don't mean in terms of offers. Anyone can bash out an a four document that says, this is what I'm going to sell and be. What I mean is, in terms of transformation, what benefit are you actually going to provide to a company? What is the overall reason that they would hire you? So, for example, companies hire me and my sales consultancy because we help their salespeople generate more revenue. That's it. That's the main benefit of working for us. People will make more money. So we have to understand who we are selling to, what industry are we selling to, and what transformation are we going to provide? Then we have to look at lead generation.
And this is where that synergy with marketing comes in. Only when we look at lead generation from a sales perspective, and particularly when we're talking about selling to corporate companies or selling B to B business to business, we're talking about Proactive targeting and outreach to leads that we know are going to be qualified and interested in what we have to sell that are more likely to convert that's. The second stage of the process is actually identifying the right leads that are most likely to convert into paying clients. You then we move on to business development. Business development, by its very nature, is the building of mutually beneficial relationships and using your consultative sales skills to be able to have productive, mutually beneficial conversations. Specifically sales conversations with your qualified leads to help you understand what their problem is and help you formulate offers and proposals that relate to solving that issue. Which brings us on to the next stage, which is offers and proposals, creating offers that ultimately solve problems, very key problems for organizations, and creating proposals that explain and outline the benefits of doing business with you and the benefits with using that particular solution.
And then finally we have delivery and resell, or some of you in the online space might know it as upsell, and that is doing a great job for a client and then letting them know where they need to go next and find posting them and if it's relevant, offering them another opportunity to work with you. Does that make sense? The process itself is not sexy, but that's what we do.
It makes perfect sense. And I think the area I would like to borrow in a little bit is this business development aspect. If we take a difficult to sell product, I'm going to pick photocopiers perfect that idea of the mutually beneficial relationship and building that through sort of beneficial conversations. When you are selling something as highly commoditized as that, how might you approach that?
It's interesting. And actually I was having this conversation with my fiancee the other day who thinks that now he is marrying me. He's become some kind of like Allen Sugar behind the scenes. He sat there the other day and we were watching I think it's the Wolf of Wall Street or something. I'd finally got to watch it and he says to me, he's like, oh my God, if I was going to sell something, I'd invent something brand new that nobody else was selling. And I'd go out and I'd make millions. And I just laughed once I stopped laughing, which is about eight minutes later. I don't think he appreciated that. I was like, I would always rather sell in a saturated market than a blue ocean one. And he was like, why you're so stupid? Me the one with the sales business. I said to him, I was like, because the chances are if you are selling something that nobody else has ever thought of it's not needed and it's not wanted. And there's not been an adequate way of expressing the pain points or transformations to make somebody want to buy it. And that is problematic.
That's harder selling in a saturated market, for example, like Photocopies, where you already know there's a clear need, there are clear problems that you can solve. There are clear transformations. There are clear people to target. That is easy because what you're talking about there is you are having to take clients that are potentially already buying from somebody else. But they're buying, right? That's the key word. They are already buying. They already need that thing. So when you are selling to them, you're not selling to them based on this is a hypothetical problem that you need to solve. You're selling to them based on you already have this issue. But here's how we can provide a better experience, provide something that's higher tech, better quality, whatever that looks like. And you're more likely to get that decision made when you're trying to sell something that nobody's ever heard of, that nobody really understands the problem that's being caused by it. That's a lot harder. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Stepping back to stage two, the lead generation. I think a lot of people, they hear lead generation and they think people filled in a form. Somebody triggered a live chat, somebody's put their hand up and said, you know what, Mr. Bob? I love what you do and I want your stuff. Please sell it to me. Now, you're not talking about that at all. And I think this is where when you're in a saturated market, that being unproactive, being passive, the whole marketing approach, it's not going to work. How proportionate is that Proactive element relative to the saturation of the market.
So it's really an interesting question. And in all honesty, Proactive lead generation should be part of your marketing and sales strategy, regardless of how saturated your market is, because people are not often looking and scrolling their Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram news feed and thinking, oh, God, I wish I could buy a photocopy today. Oh, look, here's a photocopy of salesman. Let me go and buy from him just because he happens to be that's not what people are doing. And even if you get somebody who's particularly Proactive in solving a problem, so they go onto Google and they search cannibal Photocopier in London, they're going to get Bazillion hits and they're going to fill out a Bazillion forms because they want whatever specifics they need. So they're going to look until they find that. And it's really hard to judge your business and its success by how many particularly Proactive, self aware and intelligent stakeholders that happen to have the time on their hands to go searching for you and your product and service. That's a very hard metric. You don't know and you will never know. And so that can be very frustrating for people and really disheartening because essentially every day that you're not getting picked up on Google and getting a ton of leads, you're thinking, well, my website must be rubbish or my lead magnet is crap or whatever.
And actually, it could just be that the people who would be buying from you haven't got time to go out and look for you. And why should they? Like, part of our job as salespeople is making somebody's life easier and giving them all the information and helping them to self identify. Do they even have this problem or not? And if they do, do they want to buy this thing that's going to help them or not? Would they rather have the consequences of whatever leaving that thing is going to happen? So Proactive outreach is integral regardless of how saturated the market is. Having said that, if you work in a saturated market and I do, sales arguably is one of the most saturated market in the world. And we specialize in working with sports firms. So everyone in their dog wants to work with the sports firm. It's very sexy industry. My clients are getting called all the time by other salespeople, and I admire them. And those are salespeople, in all honesty, that I want to hire because they are proactively trying to drive market share. And what often happens if you are currently buying as a stakeholder from a company that isn't providing a great customer experience or a great customer, a great customer service, or isn't listening to your needs or whatever, when these Proactive people get in touch with you and say, hey, do you want to have a chat about this?
Or, hey, I've noticed that you're not doing this in the same way that other companies are. I'd love to talk to you and share some insights. They're thinking, this person is smart enough to realize that we might have a problem keen enough to identify us as an organization they might want to support in some way and Proactive enough to try and be cultivating and building a relationship that's going to be mutually beneficial, I'm going to have a chat with them, and that's how you win business from competitors, I guess.
Another question that's really a follow on from that is I'm going to use the photocopy of sales analogy again, and apologies for any photocopy of sales people listening. Well, no, it's yours.
Yeah.
But I think it's a great example, because if you can make that work, you can make anything work. So I call up a prospect. I've got clarity as to who they are and what is the transformation. And I'm hitting stage two with my direct outreach. And I go, Hi, James. I understand you buy photocopies from time to time. Yes, I do, but we're very happy with what we've got. Thank you very much. Good bye. My experience is most people will leave it there.
Oh, yeah.
What should you be looking at next?
Well, rather than starting the call with we understand that you do this, we start the call with finding out what their existing issues are. And we want to do two things when we're on a call with a prospect. One is we want to make it clear what we want from them. So whether that's a cold call or whether it's a scheduled call, we want to set an agenda first off or set some kind of expectation about what's going to happen. So you might call and go, hey, it's Jeff from Photocopiers.com. I was wondering whether you have five minutes to chat today about any issues you might be experiencing with your current photocopier. Right. That way they know what's going to happen and they know that you're probably going to try and solve something, and they know that you are looking to talk to them about something quite specific. And at that point, most stakeholders go, no, I don't have time. And fair enough, they probably don't. And so in that instance, you would say, okay, no problem. When do you have time? When is a good time for me to have a chat with you about it?
And then they're going to do one of two things. Either they're going to give you a good time and they're going to tell you to call back, or they're going to say, I've got five minutes now because they just want to do something to make you go away, and they think that you're a spiel is going to make you go away. And that's where we go wrong, because then we do go into a spiel. Right. And there's this temptation to be like, yeah, we provide the cheapest photocopies on the market, and they're like really good and really fast, and they can whack through a whole bunch of paper. And the person's like, yeah, cool, we've already got that by, but the smart sales person starts asking questions. Okay. So just to make sure I can give you all the right information as quickly as possible and you can get rid of me. How many photocopies do you currently have in your office? We've got five. And out of interest, how many of those photocopies break down within a three month period? One. Okay. It happens quite regularly. I imagine that must be quite frustrating. Yeah, it's really annoying because X, Y and Z happened.
And what's your current supplier doing about that? Well, nothing. We keep calling, but we always get chucked on. Hold on. Do you see what I mean to you? You open up. What are the problems that must be really frustrating for you? Would you ever consider switching suppliers to somebody to a supply that you could contact via live chat, for example, so you could get an immediate response? Well, our contract doesn't come up for another three months, but, yeah, I guess we would. And are you responsible for that? Do you see? And you move them through the information and question cycle so you can find out what problems do they have? Do they even want it solved? How much money have they got to solve it? What kind of time frame are they looking to solve that problem in? Does that all make sense? So we're never selling them anything. We're just asking them questions to find out whether they have a problem that we can actually fix. And if they do that's, when we say something like, okay, well, would you like me to tell you how we deal with our customers or how we could help you to solve that problem?
I'm really glad you went that direction, because the truth is a sales conversation from beginning to end is a very simple thing, and it's only going to go in a limited number of directions. And if you're prepared for those directions, it's very easy to have the conversations. So I would have expected you to have a process for that.
But.
Hopefully anybody listening can see actually that sounds very simple. It's just having the courage to get past that first rejection and having a plan for what comes next.
It's really about having a human conversation. And I think we really forget about that. When it comes to sales, we talk about and lots of people out there will tell you there is a script to do this and a script to sell that, and that's all a load of crap, quite frankly. You have to make sure that you are having a clear conversation where you ask one question and then you actually listen to the answer and then you respond to that and ask another question. That's where people go wrong with sales. They'll either go into that spiel that we talked about and I'll tell you this and this because I'm really nervous and I just want you to tell me to get off the phone so I can be validated that I'm going to be rejected or they'll ask a bunch of questions. Hey, I want to talk to you because I want to find out what prices you're currently paying your current copy of supplier. And then I'd also like to know how many people you've got in your team and how many copies you have in the building so that I can talk to you about whether or not we could help supply copies for you for the next twelve months.
Can you tell me all of that? Right. And the person's like, no, because I don't know what you've said. When we have a sales conversation, one question, listen to their answer, then respond to that. And yes, it sounds really simple because it is because we've forgotten about humanity and how to have productive conversations.
So I guess at the end of the day, people are people, and it doesn't matter if they're in corporate or if they're in their own home. And more often these days people incorporate, frankly, they're at home. So what are maybe the top three tips that you would give to anybody who has never sold to corporate and is thinking, okay, Jess has motivated me here. I'm going to step up. I'm going to step outside my comfort zone. I'm going to do this thing I've been avoiding, frankly, never even considered it. What should their next steps be?
I think the first thing is get very clear on who you're selling to. What industry are you selling to? Financial services companies, pharmaceutical companies, public sector organizations, which industry you're going to specialize in. And that will make your life a lot easier down the line and understanding what transformation you provide. I want to be clear about that. It's not about what you think the individual employee is going to benefit from it. How will the company benefit from whatever you do? Because that's why they're paying external suppliers. It's very nice to give their employees stuff. It's very nice to make them feel better. But what does that give the company? That's the first thing. The second thing is just a personal bugbear. And I tell all my clients not to do it is to start any sales call with how are you? Because it indicates, right? A, you don't know them. You don't care how they are. If we're going to be blunt about it, B, it takes up an awful lot of time because that person is then frantically trying to think about things that they can share with you. And on a good day, they'll be like, yeah, fine, thanks.
And on a bad day, they were like, oh, my God, this happened, this happened, this happened. And before you know it, 25 minutes are gone and your sales call is over and you haven't done anything. So that's always about shout. And then Thirdly, I think the best thing that you can possibly do if you've never sold corporates before is actually look at proven processes. So go out and find information. Doesn't have to be me. Be whoever you like. Just make sure that you're looking at qualified resources. So not somebody who sat on Facebook like, oh, I was once a buyer or a procurement person in a corporate firm, and now I'm going to teach people how to sell corporate. There's not no actual sales experience. They've got lots of buying experience. They can have lots of value with that kind of information, but they're not going to teach you how to sell. Look for people who've been salespeople in a business to business environment, people who've got decent testimonials, people who've actually been capable not only of selling to corporate companies themselves in a sales role, but teaching other people how to do it. Because that's the big discrepancy that we see a lot in the online space is that we buy from people because they've done it, not because they're good at teaching how to do it.
And so when you're looking for information, especially somebody who's new or looking to do something completely different. Go and find qualified information from somebody who's a qualified teacher of that not somebody who's just good at it. The ideal is finding somebody who's both. But if all else fails, find the person who's good at teaching. That's what you want.
So my very good friend Andy Storage is a client of yours?
Yes. Love Andy.
I know he's doing extremely well. I guess where I'm leading with this is I've seen the transformation in Andy's business over the last couple of years, but I'd be keen to hear from you. Why is it worth it? What sort of transformation stories focusing on the transformation, so to speak. You know where I'm going with this. Do you have any really good stories of people who were doing okay, but when they took that step to focus in on corporate, even in a little bit, the difference that that can make.
Yeah, I know. Literally. And I'm very fortunate. I've been in this space for a very long time. So I've had my own business and I've been teaching since 2014, which makes me a veritable dinosaur in the online space, like in the online sales space. And so I'm fortunate to work with literally thousands of entrepreneurs. And that's been amazing. But there are a few standouts. So one is actually a good friend of Andy's and he was also in my mastermind and in some of my current programs. I keep joking that she doesn't find me. And her name is Julie Dennis and she's amazing. And Julie sells menopause in the workplace strategies for corporate organizations, specifically financial services, corporate organizations, so banks, wealth management firms, asset management firms, et cetera. Julie came to me in December 2018 and she sent me a message and she did a whole talk on this event I ran, so I feel okay to share it. But she did a whole talk about the fact that she came to me in December 2018 with a message that said, I'm done my business, cannot continue running the way it is. And at that time, she had been for about two years, I think, trying to sell menopause services to individual women.
So B to C, business to consumer. And she's had a Facebook group and she'd done all the challenges and all this kind of thing. And she's just like, I cannot sell one to one services anymore because people just don't want to spend the money on themselves. And she said, I want to work with you. This is my kind of really I'm going to go hard or go home on my business and what do you think I should do? And so within six weeks, we had her shut down her Facebook group, get rid of her entire business consumer email list, which she was terrified about. She spent years building. And rightly so. And we got her on to LinkedIn and selling to corporates. And for the last two years, she's been fully booked. And she has spoken on and shared panels for organizations like Coca Cola, the House of Lords. She's championed menopause policy for government organizations. She's been responsible for some of the world's largest financial services organizations implementing and educating their employees around menopause awareness training and menopause in the workplace. And Julie also takes six or seven weeks holiday every year. So she's one of my favorite people because she's always like, oh, yeah, I'm in Iceland this week or I'm going off to Portugal for a couple of weeks or whatever, let's say with coveted but still.
But she religiously takes this holiday time. And I think people don't see that with people who work with corporate so often, they think that it's going to be like an employee driven mentality. And she's a really good example of why that isn't the case. We also had a lady who stands out, a lady called Ashanti, who actually did an interview on my podcast recently. And I didn't know it. But at the time that she signed up for my program in April 2020, she was sleeping on a friend's couch. She had lost her business previously because she was running an in person like Cafe type business. And when the pandemic hit, that went overnight. And she is an amazing, incredibly resilient woman. And she actually started using her skills in the areas that she developed over the pandemic around diversity, equity and inclusion, specifically around challenging conversations around race to support organizations. And she crossed a huge financial milestone. She generated multi six figures in twelve months. And that's huge. That's not something that everybody does. And she did it. Yes. By working her socks off. She took everything that I said. And she's one of the only people that I think has ever worked with me that has literally done every single thing I've ever said.
But to go in that short space of time, from sleeping on a friend's sofa to actually using her skills and pushing forward with lead generation and having those confident business development conversations to selling multi six figures of services in one year, that's huge.
Yeah. That's life changing. That's the important thing. It really is life changing. And I think what I would want anybody listening to understand is you can hear things like six figures. And when we talk about selling can very quickly start to sound potentially quite dirty. But business is essentially very simple. It's about a value exchange. You have something that is of genuine value. It's literally magical to the right person. And then you have other people out there who desperately need that magic that you have. And if you bring the two together, that's where the value is unlocked and somebody gets paid. That's one of the most wonderful things in the world, if you can get that alignment right. And I think that's one of the best things about selling when it's done well is it's about connecting the things that are sorely needed with the people who desperately need them? And if you can do that well, and if you can do that consistently and if you can do it at scale, you can have a fantastic business and a fantastic life. And I think that's where people like you are really important, because for me, it's about making magic happen.
It's not about selling 100%.
And it's about letting I think the biggest thing about selling is that the magic happens in that sales conversation by getting a stakeholder to understand that they actually do have an issue and that the problem might not be the one that they accepted. I think a lot of the time we will let stakeholders tell us what they think the issue is. And we'll believe that with the best one in the world, they're not always correct. A lot of the time they're not correct because they are paid to do a very specific job, and they do that really well. If they could diagnose every other issue, they'd be a miracle worker. And we hear from our stakeholders who say, well, particularly in my area, they'll say, oh, we just need more leads. We need our marketing team to be better at getting leads. And we'll have to question, okay, well, what do you do with those leads? How often do you follow up with them? What happens? How often do you get the sales calls with them? And from that they'll go, oh, God, we don't need more leads. We need to do more with the ones we already have.
And we're like, yes. And it's just that moment of clarity that they suddenly understand that actually the initial problem they thought they had might not be correct. And actually they might need to fix it in a different way than they were expecting.
Well, hopefully people are listening, thinking, oh, my God, I've got a lot to do. So much opportunity for everybody if they're listening in this conversation. If people would like to go further with you, if they'd like to connect with you, how would you like them to do that?
Yeah, of course. If you are interested in selling to corporates and like I say, you want a resource that is going to be useful and proven, then you are more than welcome to head over to my podcast, which is the Selling to Corporate, originally named. You can find it on itunes, Spotify, wherever. You usually listen to podcasts that just type in Selling to Corporate, and that'll pop right up for you.
And my final question when I ask every guest is what's one thing you do now that you wish had started five years ago?
So it comes with a little story, and I hope you let me have that. I would say the one thing that I would do or wish I had started earlier was to ask for things without worrying about how it looks when I started out in the online space, people would be very odd about how they asked for support. And I think people still are. I'm not in as many Facebook groups these days, so I might be wrong, but people used to instead of asking for support, they would talk about how great they were doing. Oh my God, my clients were getting amazing results or I've got all these people on my email list and I don't need any help. And they wouldn't ask for help or they wouldn't ask for information because they thought it might make them look like they were new or they were foundational, or they weren't as advanced as people thought they were or they weren't making as much money as people thought they were. And I've always thought that was a real shame because asking questions in the right environment can get you some great results. We were talking about this before we started recording, you know, the power of events and the magic that happens there because of the conversations you have with people and the things you're able to ask them and the things that you go on to implement afterwards.
But one of the ways that I realized that I wished I'd started earlier was actually when I met the man who is now my fiancee. I laughed because he asked me out on a date on Friday night. And if you are a woman, you will know that there is a rule that you don't got a first date with anyone on a Friday night. Like, apparently it's a big old exclusive time and you should have really busy plans on a Friday. I don't ever have busy plans on a Friday. I just don't. And especially the pandemic hasn't even changed that. I can't even blame that I'm not a Friday night person. And so I had no plans. And here was this kind of ballsy guy who was like, yeah, don't go out on a Friday night. And I was like, yeah, all right, then, I guess so. And he turned up and we had this date and it was annoyingly good. Annoyingly good. And now, however, long afterwards, I'm going to be stuck with him for life. Or rather, he's going to be stuck with me for life, which is an awful way of saying that obviously he's great and I can't wait to marry him.
But if he hadn't asked, without thinking about how it looked that he didn't have any plans on a Friday night and that he was free because he wasn't busy going out on tons of dates with other people or having a big old social life, we probably would have been those people who maybe didn't go on a date at all and maybe would have been like, oh, do you want to make plans then? Oh, no. And stayed in that awkward we're trying to pretend that we've both got big lives and never made it anywhere who knows? And so I think there's a lot of value in that. Don't worry about how things look when you get on the sales call. Your job isn't to know exactly what their job entails. Ask questions, be curious, be interested. What does that mean? Oh, I've not heard that phrase before. Can you tell me what it means for your organization? Oh, other companies, you know, think about it in this way. Can you tell me what your company thinks about that or how it deals with it? Those things, they often get people stuck because people think that they're going to be looked at as being stupid or not knowing the answer or not being telepathic or whatever.
But it's so valuable to just ask and not care about who's looking at it and what they might think of you because you get so much more information and people really respect you for trying to understand something that is new or complex or that actually they just want to feel is being treated differently and not just as a number.
I think that's one of the best answers I've ever had. Questions are everything. If you don't have questions, you're really not trying, and I think nobody's going to move forward without questions. Jess, Laura Mer, thank you so much for being such a great guest. I have had great fun with you. I've learned so much. I'm going to have to have a good, long look in the dark room at what I'm doing.
That's always a nice way to start the new year.
Hopefully, the listener will to the listener. I hope you've enjoyed this week's show. And yeah, if you want to make sure you don't miss more magic like this every week, then don't forget to subscribe or if you're listening on Apple podcasts, use the new follow button. If you'd like to work with me on your own personal brand business journey, whatever stage you're at, then just email Bob at amplifymed or agency and we'll find a way to make that happen. Don't forget as well you can join the amplify personal brand business Facebook community for free. Sorry Jess, you probably don't like the word free, but just head to amplifyme agencyinsiders and welcome to the family. Jess, lauramer, thank you for your time and to you for listening. Thank you. Bye bye. Before I go, just a quick reminder to subscribe and join our Facebook group. You'll find a link in the show notes or visit amplifyme. Fminsiders. Also, connect with me wherever you hang out. You'll find me on all the social platforms at bobgentle, if you enjoyed the show, then I would love a five star review on Apple podcast. It would make my day. And if you shared the show with a friend, you would literally make my golden list.
My name is Bob gentle. Thanks to you for listening and I'll see you next week.
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