Episode 131: How Stories Speed Up Sales Cycles

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Who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Welcome to another week and for me, something that's been really topical, really at the top of the list of many of my customers over the last few months is how we can move our customers, our buyers, our potential customers, through the buying cycle a little bit quicker, getting lots and lots of feedback that says, hey, customers want to move ahead, there's great intent, but action's just not lining up with the intent in a lot of them. And I think where a lot of this is coming down to is, yes, decision making processes have slowed in some businesses. Capital is a little bit more constrained in some businesses, although I'm starting to see the first signs of that freeing up, particularly as we see cash rates start to ease. Well, in certainly in Australia, but globally, a little bit less pressure around that. But I think more than anything for me, when we hear sales cycles slowing, I like to look internally and have a look at exactly what we can influence ourselves, right? The if it's to be it's up to me mentality where we control the controllables. We only worry about the things we can influence. I could go on and on, but for me, this is the time when something's not going quite right in a business. Because businesses do go up and down. Some people call them seasons, for others, they're just different parts of your business life cycle, right? Where when things get tough, we start to look internally and think about what we can do to improve our own performance. Now, for me, one of the areas that helps close deals the fastest is around how we set them up. And I'm not planning to go through that today, but certainly an element of it I'd like to look into a little bit deeper than normal, right? And for me, just to take a step back here, how we set deals up actually allows us to be able to close them a lot faster at the other end because we get our parties, or both parties aligned on exactly what we need to be talking about, exactly the outcomes that customers are looking for. That then allows us to move through steps a lot quicker because we're not trying to cross the river by feeling the stones and really work out exactly what our customer wants. Right? So there's no doubt at all for me that the better discovery equals faster closing your deals. But something else that I think gets overlooked is the importance of winning the hearts of our customers to help speed through projects. And what I mean by that is being able to give our customers the confidence that we are the right provider for them. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean on its own that a deal will move ahead quicker. But I want you to think about times when you have uncertainty in your lives, or particularly when you're needing to do something for the first time. What helps you speed up and slow down your decision making? And for me personally, what slows down my decision making is when I'm short of knowledge, when I don't have the money, when I'm really busy, or when I simply don't know if I can trust, right. The option that I'm going to take. And that could be the provider, that could be myself, that could be those that are involved in implementing whatever I want to do. What moves things quicker for me is absolutely the inverse of some of those. But the one I'd like to focus on here is when I trust someone's going to be able to look after me. Generally, if I'm doing something for the first time, or if it's a difficult decision where I have a party that I think I can rely on, I'm more likely to take that leap of faith into wanting to work with them. And for me, that's the power of storytelling when it comes down to a business level. Being able to convey trust, good, strong reputation, the feeling of a safe pair of hands to a customer that we won't let them down when we're working with them. Particularly important for returning customers who may not have had the best experience with us in round one, but absolutely powerful also for any existing customers, because there's nothing like reminding someone of exactly how trustworthy, right, or reliable that you or your business are. So when we start to talk about wanting to speed up the close rate of deals, I'll often work with teams around their storytelling capabilities, their ability to roll out case studies and allow customers to think that they are not the only ones who have gone through this situation, that in fact, there might be a business that's very, very similar to them, perhaps even a competitor that's done exactly what they're looking at doing here and done it successfully. So the power of storytelling, for me, there is the art of conveying it through language, right? The communication that we have as salespeople. But I think there's also an ability for anyone that isn't necessarily as strong at natural storytelling to be able to convey stories through case studies. And today I'd like to look at how, as a team, we can set ourselves up to have really strong case studies. Now, leaders that are listening, we all know what case studies are. Salespeople, business owners that are listening, we all know what they are. But I'd like you to have a look now as you're sitting down or driving or walking or whatever you're doing, and actually ask yourself the question around how many good case studies do you have? What does that number look like? For the businesses that I work with that do this really well, they have at least 20. Now, that number, when I say at least, rises pretty quickly, depending on the number of divisions and products you have. But for me, a really good business has for their team a regimented library or a catalogue of case studies that they can lean into that will show them opportunities across a variety of situations. And so by having these set up and ready for their teams to use, we take away a lot of cognitive load for from our salespeople in particular, on having to think about those case studies on the spot, right? About when they're working with customers to be able to think, okay, who am I going to reference? Or how can I show some social proof that we know our stuff and that you can trust what we're going to do. So let's talk a little bit today about A, how we're going to go about the structure of setting up case studies, and then B, how we write those case studies for them to have maximum impact. So. So when we look at structure, first I talk about having 20 of those, but how do we build out 20 case studies without having simply duplicates of very similar types of case studies? Red surfboard, blue surfboard, green surfboard, orange surfboard. Right. Well, for me, the way that we do this, and I've just done this really successfully with one of my customers who's in the medical industry, they're a B2C business by having to build out case studies for his clients and how he's gone about it is setting it up. And this is the way I'd recommend is setting up, firstly by your different type of customer profiles. So in his instance we have young couples, we have middle aged with families and then we have retirees. Right. So there's three types for him as to the type of people that he markets to in his business. He's predominantly male driven, but he's looking to expand into more female buyers. And without going to the business, it's very reasonable to have certain male or female segments when it comes to who you're targeting. For him, he's building out three case studies, four for the young couples, the families and then the retirees focused thing in them, firstly at the male market and then secondly at the female market. So straight away for him he has six case studies there that he's rolled out. He's also then rolling these out based on the level of severity. Right. Of the issue that you need resolved. And let's just say there's low and high for this business, right? So he's taking those six case studies and for each of those he has a low. Right. A low significance of impact on his patient and. And a high significance of impact on his patient. So straight away, those six case studies, when you have two types of scenarios for each patient, gives you 12. He's actually then also rolling them out to a few other different areas where he's having some selected case studies across his groups around where they live, their socioeconomic factor and even some very specific results that some of his customers are looking. So these things talk about setting them as regional versus metro. We're, we talk about having to borrow money to pay for what they need versus having being a cash patient. And then the third piece, there is some very specific outcomes that they'd like and it's a business where certainly patients have very different outcomes and he's got two or three very specific outcomes that he likes to talk through his customers with. So all of a sudden this business has built 20 case studies out like that in the blink of an eye and is able to roll them out and have them ready as a little library so that whenever patients come into his clinic, he's able to talk through each of those specific examples. And this is a high ticket type of medical business as well. We're not talking about going to a gp, but certainly a very high level of impact and cost to people's lives. So that's a really nice way to be building out your repertoire, right. If you're in a B2B environment. You might want to be looking at certain types of segments. You might have four or five segments that you deal with. Education, finance, transport, manufacturing, wholesaling, right? Lots and lots of services, lots and lots of different type of segments. You. You build out different segments there. You might have different customer sizes, different product types, and all of a sudden these can add up really quickly. But my prime recommendation here is to simply pick four or five segments straight away in the B2B space and start there. With a very regimented approach to your case studies, you'll find they build out really quickly, particularly if you have a team of salespeople and you can ask them to do one or two or three case studies each for smaller businesses. Right. You might want to lean on others within your team. So you might want to lean on dictating or simply recording them via loom and talking through the case studies and getting some support to write them up. Right. If you're a business owner or a sales leader with a very small team. Quite powerful to simply sit in front of a camera. And loom's the one I obviously recommend quite regularly, but sit in front of that camera and talk for 30 minutes across 20 or so case studies. Case studies that work really well are very short and powerful. So if you're simply recording them via video, you should be able to get through one every one to two minutes. Nice short, sharp position, particularly if you prepare. So being able to record 20 case studies, 30 minutes preparation, 30 minutes, rolling out on video, and then you get some support to create those case studies. Really, really powerful. Okay, so then we start to move into. We've got a number of case studies, we've got some broad approaches as to how we can get people to help us do them. I think where we also need to be focusing time to generate really good case studies is making sure that we have the format of them right. And for me, the shorter the better. When it comes to case studies, we know that we live in a world where attention spans are a little bit shorter than they used to be. So where you can keep your case studies to one page. Nice, short and sharp. And I'll go through the format on that page in a moment. Little bit of visuals in there. Nice consistent design across all of your case studies. Lots of white space so that they're nice and easy to read. That's a very nice broad speaking framework that I think works really well for case studies. And even better is when you can take those case studies and convert them into A video format. So if I look really broadly across case studies, we move on from that written version here. Where I see businesses most powerfully using case studies or social proof is that they have written case studies, and that's the 20 that we're talking about and focusing today. They also have video case studies. I generally recommend you keep them down to a minute or less. So we have Again, up to 20 customers who are talking about us. Right. And then the third one is that we have quotes. Again, up to 20 quotes that we can roll through our literature, through our quotes, through our emails, through our website that really show firsthand from customers how we've worked with them. So we're talking about written, video and quoted testimonials. But today, obviously focusing heavily on the written piece, because I think that's the best spot to start when you're wondering where to go. And from there you can very easily take quotes, so you can very easily cover your second form of case study from there. Okay, so we've got a number of case studies. We're starting to work out how we build a catalogue of stories, a broad speaking format in terms of layout on the page. Really, really impactful with case studies. And then I think for me, from there we start to talk about, well, how do we actually structure those case studies? So how do we make sure that the content in there is engaging, is compelling, and above everything else, steps our customers forward that one little step more towards having a successful deal. Okay, so when it comes down to written case studies, the areas I want to go through is a template that I've been using for at least 10 years, both personally in my businesses and across the hundreds and hundreds of salespeople that I've coached over the last couple of years. Right. And it's very much about keeping it simple. So how these case studies work. Okay, so I want you to picture you've got this white piece of paper in front of you. It's blank at the moment. And we're wanting to attract attention of our customers, whether they're written case studies, digital versions or on our website. And the number one, the most powerful way that I see a lot of the brands that I work with really create that attention is the hook in the title. And that hook in the title quite simply comes down to the most impactful thing that you did for that customer in that engagement with them. Is it saving them money? Is it allowing them to buy new equipment? Is it increasing the efficiency of a process? Is it sorting out staff issues? Is it rolling in products that has allowed them to be more efficient in front of house operations. Has it rolled out better outcomes for their customers? Right, Whatever that outcome may be, we start with that and we keep it short and sharp. How we saved Australian logistics $25,000 per annum. How we increase velocity of deals with whoever the company is by X percent. How we bought $235,000 worth of business into X company simply by changing their sales structure, right? Whatever it may be, a nice short, sharp hook that's very much focused on the outcome. If we get that right, we've got people's attention now. It doesn't mean we've got it for the whole case study, but we certainly start off in the right way. So next piece I want you to do is I want you to think about three sections here on your case study, right? Three areas and yes, we want some pictures in there on that one page. And those three areas talk about three different things. Number one being the situation. So that is, what was the problem at hand for the customer? What was the opportunity we were trying to help them capitalise on or take advantage on, but really the main crux of why we got together with that customer, right? So problem to solve or opportunity to take advantage of? Number two is what we did, right? So where we went and fixed the problem or took advantage of the opportunity. Now, I'm going to go through some examples of these in a moment, right? And then the third one is the outcome, the results that we gave for our customer right? Now, these are not just the features and benefits that resulted simply in some really basic, you know, dollar savings, right? Now, I know that dollar savings are the heading here, but we're just trying to get attention there. But this is really where those dollar savings have taken the business to another level and allowed them to function well beyond just those linear results that we gave them. So let me go through some examples here, right? So if we're talking about the situation first, right, how we helped a customer solve a problem or capitalise on an opportunity. Let's have a look at three markets here. So if you're a B2B business, right, a great example of a case study here was in the renewables industry. We worked with a business who had a huge amount of roof space, right, but an aging roof and a huge amount of land around them, right, that they weren't able to use generally for council permits. The land just wasn't suitable for building. They also had a huge energy bill because they were a heavy production industry around. Actually, in the bread, in the wraps Industry, right? So they had a dangerous site because they had flower particles floating around, right? Not so good when you're installing solar panels. They had a big roof, right. They had huge energy bills and they really needed to save some money. So the problem for them was how do we get your power bill down? But take into account that you've got a very tricky situation to work on. So that's the situation. So what we did for them, this is where we talk about that. This is much more linear. We installed solar panels on the roof of their building, a megawatt of solar on the roof of their building. We also then installed a 500 kilowatt solar system onto their paddock, their neighboring paddock, right. And we did this by making sure that we had very little impact to their operating ecosystem. Particular particularly given the dangers around flour, right. And particles being in the air. So we just talk very. At a very structured level around what we did. That's the easiest part of the case study. The outcome, right? Where the outcome now comes in is, okay, so we save this customer $200,000 a year on their energy bills. Fantastic. It's really important to get that out. But what they then did with that capital was allowed them to invest into more equipment and more machinery for their business because that money came straight off their bottom line. So we not only saved them $200,000, but we enabled them to produce more, which enabled them to sell more and grow their business quicker. Right. And particularly for businesses who don't have infinite capital, which is a majority of them, where we're able to take that money and put it into something else, that case study becomes really powerful. So problem needed to bring their energy bills down, right? And a complex site solution. We got busy and did something a little bit different. Got some council permits for a really tricky ground mount system out in the paddock. Got it in, worked in that difficult situation. The outcome was saved them a whole lot of money, but allowed them to then put it into something else in their business. So that's your B2B example. If we talk about situation, what we did and outcome, or situation response, and outcome as we call it, if we have a look at a services business, right? So I'll use an example here of my current business where the situation was working with a contracting business in the building industry, a growing, a really fast growing painting business, right? But they weren't profitable. So they were growing fast, but they weren't necessarily making money, right? So their problem was fast growth, poor cash flow and uncertainty around how they grow from there, the response what we did was we sat down, built out a really structured sales process that ensured that the projects they were quoting on were profitable. So they were quoting on the right projects at the right time with the right margins. And then we worked on streamlining their back of house just to help them save a few pennies when it came to delivery. Right. So problem growing, not profitable response, sit down and build structure into their sales process. So they were quoting on the right deals at the right time. Right. To make money. And the outcome for them was this was a terrific result. They actually tripled the revenue of the business and took them to be a really healthy low double digit ebit. Right. So low double digit profit within three months of working together now I mean that's a fantastic result. Tripled. Your business went from unprofitable to low double digit profit in a three to four month period. Right. Wow, you look at that really strong case study and the title for that one might have been how we help X contractor triple their revenue and grow to double digit profit in three months. Right. Nice and easy. So that's a great services example and often services are really easy to get a great case study going for. Last but not least, you're in the B2C industry. So in this instance, working with a company who was helping providing home products, right? So significant products to homes. In this instance, this customer had an issue that they were trying to design their dream home but they could not get the design completed locally. No one locally would produce the product that they wanted without it costing them way over their budget. Right. So dream solution not being able to afford it with their funding that was available so that the customer we worked with here, they actually designed everything they needed locally, manufactured overseas and imported in. Right. So they're designed locally, manufactured overseas and imported in. Quite simple. In terms of the response here, the outcome for the customer was that they actually able could then afford their dream within their budget. So the outcome here for the customer is they went from not being able to have their dream product, their dream home. Right. It was not feasible for them to by solving that issue through manufacturing overseas and taking away some middlemen that they could actually have that dream. So super powerful here because their dream was actually brought to life. This is a great example to do some really fantastic photos because you can see that genuine excitement in your customers and that is absolutely conveyable through pictures when you're doing case studies. So there are three examples around how you would do case studies, but I just want to go through that format Again, before we finish off. And that's to say that when we're building great case studies, we have a situation, not a problem or an opportunity. We have the response, what we did to bring that to life. And then we have the outcomes, right? And they are more than just those obvious benefits. We start to talk about what we're able to do for the customer, for the person or the business, right, to really bring some of their business or personal dreams to life. So that's case studies. I see a lot of businesses talk about wanting to do case studies, but for many of them, they fall down the pecking order in terms of priority. Now, I would say as I went through that format earlier today, right, at the very leanest of cases here, it simply takes one experienced person in a business to sit in front of a camera for half an hour, talk through situation, response and outcome across 20 or so case studies, and then you can outsource that to get that done. Right. And you can get it done really cheaply. I'd be surprised if you weren't able to outsource that for 1000 or $2000 to get 20 case studies built. Right. Nice and cheap, low cost. But wow, can they have an impact at hastening the sales cycle. For me, when we build that trust, we take away one of the reasons that customers may be slow to proceed, right? And that's whether or not they can trust the provider to deliver. So that's it for today. That's case studies done. That's a broad stroke around how we can build out some trust through our customers. We didn't cover video case studies, we didn't cover quotes. It can certainly help. For anyone that needs any advice there, just give me a call. But the outcome I'm hoping everyone takes from today is to make time in your calendar. Not this week, not next week. Do it in two weeks, right? Most people will have blank space in two weeks. Sit down, book it in now and make it happen. Because setting yourself or your teams up with stories and the ability to tell stories is a terrific way to build your business. Okay, thanks everyone. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. See you next week.

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