MBA1938 Must Read: Demand-Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Daily Business Lessons delivered in plain English every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a must read episode. On our must read episodes, I share with you a book that I've read that has influenced me as an entrepreneur. I share with you its insights, my takeaways and how it actually impacted my Today's must read is Demand Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta.Demand Side Sales 101 was a book that was recommended by Michelle Hanson, a fellow product person and entrepreneur. And boy am I happy that I read this book. Sometimes you read books that are great reminders. Sometimes you read books that give you great strategies. Some books just blow your mind and this is one of those books that kind of opened the matrix to you where you start seeing things in a different way. For a lot of us, selling can feel icky. Your stomach might start to tighten, you might start feeling nervous. But you know you have to sell to be able to have a sustainable business. But here's the truth. Sales doesn't have to feel like it doesn't have to feel weird. In fact, you can create an experience that can help sell your products and services that is comfortable for you and the customer. Demand side Sales is all about understanding how people buy and meeting people at where they're at in their journey and helping them get to the goal they need to reach. This is actually the opposite approach of typical sales which is supply side sales where we just tell people about our product, we rattle off features, we rattle off testimonials, and we just think that will do the trick. This book turns sales upside down and helps you along the way. I'm going to explain to you exactly what I mean by that and how you can apply some of the things that is mentioned in this book and why you should read this book so you can apply it to your so let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Demand side sales one on one allows you to start learning to see what your customers see to understand your customer's journey to understand what gets them to the point where they start considering your product or service. Why is this so important? Because you want to meet them there. You want to make sure you are there to help them along the way. One of the first things you learn in this book is that nothing is random. There's no such thing as an impulse buy. A lot of people think, oh, I just bought it because I needed it or I thought it was a good idea and I put it pull the trigger. There are a lot of things that go into a decision of buying something big or small. And whether you recognize it or not, you as a consumer and your customers as consumers make decisions along the way to get to the point where they buy something. I'm going to give you a quick example because this is really going to shine a light on why this book is so impactful. Throughout the book they give you example after example of a buyer's journey and show you hey, you see how the buyer gets influenced along the way to Make a purchase and you can do this without having to do any kind of aggressive sales. So the example I'm going to give you is a personal example. Recently I've been looking to have a little bit more guidance with my exercise and fitness. I wasn't sure if I needed a personal trainer or if I needed a virtual trainer like somebody online, or if I can just look up some programs. I felt like I was somewhere in between getting a personal trainer and having a program that I could follow myself. I'm pretty disciplined when it comes to the gym and to my own personal motivation. Like if I was given a diet, I would follow it. So I don't necessarily feel the need for the accountability of a personal trainer. But at the same time, if that's my only option, I'll go with that. So I've been researching different options, I've considered different options. And because I've been searching these terms and looking up articles and looking at YouTube videos, I've been getting a lot of ads on this topic. One of the ads I used to get a lot of is for this app called the center app, which is an app that that was started by the actor Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor. I was aware of this app, but I didn't really know what it did. I didn't really know what it could offer. And to me, at first glance, it just seemed to me that it's just an app that has a bunch of exercises that you could follow. But along the way, when I started researching in particular a meal plan for somebody of my age and weight, center had a blog post that was really helpful that actually I read it and I was like, okay, I know exactly what the macros I need to have and I know how much protein I need to consume and my total calorie count. And I realized, oh, this blog post is from Center. That app I keep seeing. Oh, I didn't know that they know about nutrition. I thought they were just about exercise. At the bottom of the page it said, sign up for a free seven day trial. that point, I went to their website and started looking into it. Hey, what is this thing? And I realized, oh no, they have a bunch of programs that include nutrition. It includes exercise, it shows you what to do exactly every single day. And it was exactly what I was looking for. I signed up for the trial, I started using the program, I started going to the gym and following these exercises. I started eating some of the recipes that they were recommending that I put together my meal plan. This prompted me to you guessed it, sign up for a full on membership for a year. Nothing is random in this experience here. I first became aware of them passively through their ads because obviously they're targeting me because I'm going through all these keywords and I'm searching and I'm part of groups and Facebook. So they knew I was their type of customer. They just needed to get in front of me. And then they met me along the journey when I was trying to research diet, their blog post showed up. So along the way, somewhere on the team at center they figured out this is one of the paths that people go through to sign up. So we got to meet people along that path so that we can support them to get to the goal of getting their results, obviously their health results. But ultimately signing up for this is what this book is all about. This is a long example to show you that this book shows you how to create these journeys. Now you might be thinking, wow, there's got to be endless journeys or endless paths that people go through to get to buy my product. The funny thing is that this book, Demand side Sales, actually did all this research and found out it's actually not that many paths. Most businesses have five, maybe six paths that most of their customers are most important customers or most consistent customers will go through to get to you to buy your product or service. So it's actually not that many paths. Your job as a business owner is identifying these paths. And this book outlines how to do that through customer interviews. Find out how that customer got to where they are today, which is a happy paying customer. You're gonna work backwards. And they actually show you how to ask questions on these calls in these interviews. So you get the right answers, or I should say, you get the truth, you get the information you need to understand their path. And they say the best way to do this is actually to pretend you are doing a documentary. And you can actually say to the customer, pretend we're doing a documentary and we're just trying to document your journey. Now the interesting thing about this book is that it just shows you that there are certain points in the buyer's journey where the customer has to make certain decisions. And there are certain points where they kind of fall off and don't buy because they get stuck. These are friction points that you have to solve as a business owner. You need to make sure that these are not problems for your customers that they can get over these problems so they can continue on the journey to buy your product. An example they share in the book is when somebody buys a new home, the demographic that they were selling to when buying new homes were empty nesters. People that had their kids kind of move out. They're older now, they have a lot of memories in their house. They know they don't need this big property, but they all this memorabilia and all this nostalgic stuff from the house that won't fit in a condo. And it was a sticking point. It was a problem. People didn't get over that problem and therefore never moved and never moved into a new place and therefore they never got the business. They realized this and realized, hey, we need to be more than just a company that provides empty nesters with homes. They actually built a storage facility right across from the housing community that they built for these empty nesters to buy. That way they don't have to sacrifice or sell or give away their memories. They solved the problem that was stopping the customer from buying. Another issue was that people thought moving was a headache and they just were overwhelmed by the thought of moving. Especially when you get older and you just feel like, I don't know how to organize all this. Movers are going to be expensive. So they actually included the moving costs in the cost of their product of the new home, and therefore they didn't need to worry about anything. Hey, we will move you into your new place as a part of our service. This is when you're really cooking, okay? When you start solving problems for your customers that are stopping them from buying, this is magic. You need to find out what stops your ideal customer from buying. What friction points do they face? How can you solve these problems so they're not problems anymore where you just alleviate the pain and make it a no brainer.

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I want to share with you a few more takeaways From Demand Site Sales 101. One of the things that we learned from this book and apply to our software company, webinar Ninja is when a customer joins us. Whether they're joining us on a free plan or a paid plan, we need to understand who they are, what they're trying to achieve and where they're at right now in that journey of achieving that goal. So we literally ask every single new member now in our onboarding those questions. We ask them, what are you trying to achieve with webinars? Where are you at right now in terms of your skill level? Do you have materials ready? Do you have your slides ready? Do you have your content ready? And basically, people fill out this form, giving you a little bit behind the scenes here of our company, but they fill out this form, they fill out the choices, and we have these triggers in the background to supply our new customers with great content. Content actually applies to them. Instead of just spraying and praying, you know, just giving them everything we got here, read all this content. We give them specific blog posts, specific videos, specific training on how to achieve what they said they want to achieve. So if they said, hey, I want to get more leads as one of my goals of running webinars, then we supply them with a great blog post and guide on how to turn webinars into a lead magnet, how to leverage automated webinars to get continuous leads. Let's say, for example, the onboarding, they said, hey, I don't have my slides together. It's all still in my head. Well, then we give them our guide on how to build great presentations with Canva. Why are we doing this? Well, we're trying to apply what we learned in the book is that, hey, there are some roadblocks still for them to actually achieve the goal, which is to have a successful webinar that impacts their business, and we need to help them get to the finish line. It's not done yet when they buy, it's done when they succeed. Because when they succeed, they continue to stay with us and love the product and continue to use it. So we've learned a lot from this book and applied it right away in our onboarding, so we can make sure that we give great training and help people through those roadblocks so they can achieve their goal. And by the way, you could do the same. You don't have to do some custom coding like we did, where they see it as soon as they join. You can literally just send them a survey, use SurveyMonkey, and they fill out the survey, and then you can give them the information accordingly. You can literally be broadcasting those emails manually to them until you have something automated. The point here is that you're gonna see higher conversions and you're gonna see people achieving the goals they're looking for when they signed up for your product or service faster and it's going to result in great word of mouth for your product and service. And people are going to then come through that word of mouth feeling like, yeah, this product actually cares. This product actually helps me get to where I want to go. I highly recommend you pick up demand Site Sales 101 by Bob Moesta One of the best books I've read in a few months now, and I read a lot of books. Definitely one of the top books I read this year. Pick it up, read it. You will not regret it. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe, hit follow, hit whatever it says on your favorite podcast app to make sure you get our next episodes automatically. Tomorrow we share with you the cost of upgrading or updating your logo, your branding, because we just did it at our company webinar Ninja. We'll talk about the financial costs, the labor costs and all the work and things you have to keep in mind whenever you make a big change like that. If you're thinking about refreshing your branding, you're gonna love this episode. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. This book in particular really kind of rewires your brain. Sometimes when you read books like this you just need to slow down a little bit. You can't zoom through it. I actually think this is a great book to actually read and not listen to as an audiobook because there was a few times where I had to stop and reread a paragraph and let it sink in. These books that change the way you think, take it slow, absorb the knowledge, enjoy it. A great one for the beach. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care.

Hey Fidelity, what's it cost to invest with the Fidelity app? Start with as little as $1 with no account fees or trade commissions on U.S. stocks and ETFs.

Hmm.

That's music to my ears. I can only talk.

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. 0 account fees applied to retail brokerage accounts only Sell order assessment fee not included. A limited number of ETFs are subject to a transaction based service fee of $1. See full list at fidelity. Com Commissions Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC Member nyse, SIPC.