Selling to the Modern Buyer: Revolutionizing Your Sales Approach

You.

I'm Brian Palmer and, and this is, I'm very excited to be here. Have been looking forward to this for, for months and really do focus, you know my, my focus is on selling to that modern buyer. So before I really dive in, I do want to say just you know, a little bit about me. Kind of why you should listen to what I have to say. Um, I've been doing this for 20 years. I know it might not look like it. I think the first time I talked to Gerhardt he said I looked like I was like 31 years old. My birthday is actually tomorrow. I'm turning 40. So I get to spend it with all you wonderful people. Really excited to do that. But I've been doing this for a long time. Started my first business in college. I kind of fell into sales training now on accident. I don't consider myself to be a salesperson. I don't consider myself to be anything like that. I'm kind of the opposite of what, of what traditional sales training is. And I started a marketing company in 2011. I was fortunate to sell that in 2021 but I kept the naming rights so I'm reopening that again. And I've just been doing this stuff for a long time and it's all centered around creating the experience. And so when I first started working I worked with some, with some big names. Two of these companies I still work with and consult with today. But I started building marketing campaigns and funnels and teaching their teams how to do things a little bit differently. That was years ago. I have kind of moved more now to working with small to medium sized businesses. I love that. I love being able to conceptualize something on like a Monday and have a first draft of it on a Friday. So I like a little bit more fast paced. But yeah, this is something I love to do. I love talking with people, I love forming relationships and I love helping businesses grow. So there's also as we go, please make sure that you're getting in touch with me. I love talking with people as you're going to see if you schedule a meeting with me, if you reach out and we have jam sessions. I don't sell anything. I do sell things, but I don't sell anything. So I just love talking with people. I love helping, I love doing whatever I can. One way I can help, I got a free newsletter that goes out every Monday morning on sales tips and things that I'm doing because you know I'll, I'll note that I am selling and I'm sold to Every day I have to sell and develop business for my marketing company. I train my client sales teams. I'm doing this every day. And I have access over the years to thousands of data points and results from campaigns and sales, you know, down to content subject lines, what type of content works best with buyers. So I've been really immersed in this for such a long time. And so I want to go over and just start with a little bit on how selling has changed, at least in my eyes. So I've gotten some of these stats from Salesforce and Gardner and some of these studies. And I'll start with the fact that this, we probably all know this, it's the elephant in the room these days. Selling has just gotten a lot harder. And the reason is that buyers expectations, they've changed the way they buy has changed the way they, you know, absorb information and find that information. It's all changed. And we have to start thinking about, you know, what our digital experiences are in our personal lives that boil over to our professional lives. So think Netflix, Amazon, all these businesses that we interact with on a daily basis, what that has done for our experience, how that has changed the way we want to be sold to how it changes the way we want to interact. And we got to know in order to sell and develop that experience, we have to be doing it digitally and on the channels that people are using. So you have to understand your buyers, where they are, what devices they're on, important to them. And now granted, nothing, nothing is better than a face to face meeting. And whenever I try to get those, I will always do that. But you know, 80% of your sales interactions are going to occur digitally. So we have to know how to obviously be trained in sales, but how to offer a great experience and do it digitally. And it's a challenge. It's a lot easier with certain tools we have out there. But one thing that really adds to the challenge is the fact that a third of a third of buyers, they just don't want to talk to you, they don't want any interaction with you. So being a salesperson, it's a lot harder today. But if you know things like this, if you understand that most people don't want to talk to me because I'm a sales rep and we flip that script and rewire your brain a little bit, then the results are going to be there. And so many teams and clients that I work with, they just don't feel like they are well enough equipped. And this is not just equipped in sales Training this is equipped in knowing their product or service, knowing, you know, really how to create that experience for today's buyers and how to sell. And you know, again, all these stats, they, they bring challenges, but they bring opportunity. Because every single one of these obviously 80% of sales thing, that, that, that's not really something you overcome, but the rest you can overcome by just offering a better experience. And we're all here because, you know, we sell, we're interested in that. I'm a sales trainer, even though I don't call myself that. But the one thing that I want us all to do is to stop selling. I don't, I don't think anyone needs to sell at all today. And I would go against a lot of that traditional selling. Now I teach all this, I teach overcoming objections and all this. But I teach situational selling because I don't want you just to sell. I want you to be delivering a buyer experience and I want you to become a trusted consultant. Because buyers today, they have tons of information. We talked about it in one of the sessions earlier today. There's information overload. So how can you help a buyer kind of decipher and go through all the information that's in front of them and lead them to the best buying decision, the best solution to their problems? Now of course we want it to be your solution, your product or service, but how can you be that consultant? So that's a really big part of how I train, how I work and how I build funnels for, for clients is just making sure that we're delivering that experience. We're offering value and we're becoming a consultant and not a salesperson. So we want to talk about that experience, right? How do you craft that experience? How do you craft an ideal buying experience? And I'll start by saying that where a lot of businesses fail, where a lot of sales teams fail and sales reps is they have this, this linear one size fits all approach. So on the left you see the funnel and then you kind of go down this, this pre built path where essentially everyone's going down the same path and you get a lead, they all go down this, they all kind of get that same experience. That just doesn't work today. That's not going to work. We have the technology now to not have to do that. Even though it's still done all the time. We know what we need to do and what we should be doing is offering different and customized experiences and we can do that at scale. So in the last session we talked a lot about CRMs. And I asked, I posted that question on the. Or that comment on CRM training and governance because I really believe that we can do this the right way and we can do it at scale. And there's a few things that if we're going to offer that experience, a few things that I call essentially, I guess, a recipe for success. And it really starts with understanding your audience and your competition and the market. And so few sales teams and sales reps actually spend the time. And I don't mean just, yeah, we understand our audience. It's this company and we sell to that company. No, I mean understanding them, right? What are their problems, what keeps them up at night? How can you solve that? I actually build and lead customer Persona exercises for sales teams, which most of them don't even really know what that is because that's more of a marketing led thing. We also do that my marketing company too. So journey maps and Personas, we build those to help teams really understand who they're going after. And then of course, you need to know your competition really well and you need to the market. You also have to have that right sales training. Right. So you need to be able to understand how to sell to the modern buyer. And a lot of businesses just don't do that. They're still using and being trained on these outdated methods like overcoming objections. And even though I teach that, I'll teach it 20 different ways because it's situational selling, where you might hear that same objection, but you might have to respond to it 20 different ways based on the people that you're talking to or where they are in that stage. So training goes a long way. Companies still need to be investing in the right sales training, but they need to be doing it in a way that allows them to create that experience. I've already talked about this. I want you to become a trusted consultant. I think that is super, super important. So we want to make sure we don't lose sight of that. People want to buy from people they trust. They want to buy from people like them. So you got to develop that rapport. They want to buy from people that can solve their problems. So you do that by being a trusted consultant. And I teach teams how to go from being a sales rep to a consultant, because a lot of people think, well, I'm not trained to be a consultant. And I beg to differ. You know, I think as long as you know your audience, your competition in the market, you can be a consultant in this world. So very powerful to just retrain Your brain kind of rewire the mindset of, I'm not going to be a sales rep, I'm going to be a consultant, and you'll get better results that way. We're going to talk a little bit more about this, but you got to have different paths a buyer can go down, and you got to be able to do that at scale. So CRM's using AI, you got to be able to do that. And then you want to make sure that you're having the right resources and the right education material. So you know, people are talking about content and how AI is killing content. And I don't necessarily disagree with that, but you got to make sure that you have the right resources. And this is where the training comes into play, because you need to have resources and material for the people that you're going after. Do you have material that's relevant to a cmo? Do you have material that's relevant to a cfo? Everything needs to be catered as much as you can to the people and the buyers that you're going after and where they are in that cycle. And then lastly, putting CRMs in place. And I'm going to show a quick example of what you can do there. Because CRMs, customer relationship management, using AI, using CRMs and putting them together, that's going to aid and empower your sales team. Nobody wants to replace anybody, but you can't expect sales reps or yourself to not have deals or leads fall through the cracks. If you're doing this at scale, you gotta have ways of reaching out and making sure that you're offering that custom experience. And some of this can be automated and some of it's notifying you at the right times to get involved. So you gotta have that happy mix and you build all of that in a CRM. So if we're looking at kind of an example, and I know I'm breezing through this, I apologize, but I have limited time. So if I show just essentially what this could look like, and this is just, again, a really small example of what you can do with, with automation and a CRM. And you can use AI to complement this and analyze data. I know we have inbound, we have outbound, we have all kinds of sales. But let's pretend for this example, somebody comes in on your website and they fill out a form. Well, we know that they're likely to be assigned by a rep who's going to give them a phone call, and that rep's probably going to also put an email out and you're going to start to understand or start to bring in data, compile that data and look at that. Right, so are they responding? Are they opening the emails? What are they interested in? But where a lot of businesses fail again, is that linear, one size fits all, where then they just kind of go down this cycle of email, phone, email, phone, and I've got several examples here, but at the same time, most reps, they're giving up after two to three attempts anyway, and they don't have any reminders, any automation on the back end to help make sure that doesn't happen. But we want to do things a little bit differently today. For today's, you know, modern buyer, we want to put them down different pathways. I have what I call the laws of seven, which is at any stage in a buying process, doesn't matter, it's going to take at least seven attempts for you to hear back from somebody. And those seven attempts shouldn't be just email, they shouldn't be just phone. They should be a combination of different technologies, different ways. Right, but let's say, you know, you're going after them and you've, you've done several attempts and then they respond on LinkedIn. We still want to take that a step further. When did they respond? When are they engaging? When are they looking at content? Is it in the morning or is it more in the evening or the afternoons? And how can you cater your approach? So let's say it's more in the afternoon, in the evenings, well, then the rep is going to be notified. Or these can come from you automatically, where you, you know, you're going to focus your efforts on LinkedIn and messaging and connecting and nurturing there. And of course you want to get them to book that demo, but then, you know, the work is still out, you still have to be nurturing them. And you're doing all this at scale, which ultimately leads to, you know, that, that closed deal. But the great thing about all of this here is that when you're putting it in place the right way, it's scalable, it's repeatable. You can go in, look at the data, analyze it, you can make changes. Let's say you have a seven email sequence and you want to know, okay, where are people converting or taking action on? Is it email 1, is it email 4? Maybe it's email 5 and you want to move that up to email 1. You can use all the data to improve your process. And this is the stuff I geek out on. I'm super fascinated by creating just an exceptional buyer experience. And so I just wanted to go through that and help. Help you think through a little bit differently how to do it and when you're, you know, it doesn't matter the product or the service you're selling. Just I want you to rethink how you're approaching a buyer and what experience they need to feel comfortable doing business with you. So right at time, I, I think, I think I nailed it. I think I got through everything I needed to in, in 15 minutes. But yeah, definitely, please reach out to me. I'm an open book with this stuff. I love talking about it. I will also follow up. I've got a free sales training too that goes a little bit more into depth on what I just talked about. You can get that through my LinkedIn profile on my website. You can do all that. And then just by attending this conference today, I will reach out and connect with, with each and every one of you. And I also have a big discount on my training if you're interested in that, which is only a couple hundred bucks and you get access and free updates for life. Because I'm flipping the script on sales training because I don't like sales training. So I'm trying to do a little bit differently. So anyway, I look forward to connecting with everybody and thank you so much for being here and I hope this was helpful. So that's all I have for today. Thank you, Brian. That's so helpful. I mean, it's just all of these reminders and thinking about that buyer. It was so good and engaging, entertaining. I enjoyed listening to this. Thank you. Thank you. I hope I stayed on time. I think I did. So, yeah. Proud of myself for that.

Brian, I want to thank you for teaching me separately about a sales funnel. And it gave me a lot to think about because there is a sales funnel in the sales funnel and most people do not have a great way of analyzing it and analyzing the effectiveness and improving it. And I also, you know, we talked about AI, so I put in an email that I wanted to send to prospects and I said create a sequence of six emails based on that one email and did it within like one minute. And I got five different subject lines for each. So I had a lot of great material to work with that and it really works. I'm using it now to invite people to sign up for the conference. And I want to thank you for teaching me.

Yeah, you're very welcome. I really enjoyed it and happy to be here. Happy to help.

How do people get in touch with you?

So my email, if that's still on screen, definitely reach out there, LinkedIn, you can go to my website, palmersalestraining.com and you can get in touch with me that way. And like I said, I mean, I'm an open book with this stuff. I will talk with you, schedule meetings, have jam sessions and just try to help in any way that I can. No money has to exchange hands. I'm not even going to ask for that. So I just love talking with people and getting to know you and what you sell and the challenges, and I will help you try to overcome those. So look forward to it.