Bringing High Value to Every Customer Interaction - Thought Leadership Leverage

Peter Winick here. Today my guest is Andy Paul, who is the founder of Zero Time Selling and the author of the book Zero Time Selling, which was a top 3 sales and marketing book for 2011, and it's still a top 3 sales and marketing book, in my humble opinion.

Forever.

Forever.

Thank you.

In all eternity, wherever you're watching this. So a lot of times salespeople are so excited, we're always thinking about the next step. So I'm going to have this interaction with a client and my goal, my objective is to get to the meeting or to get to that next meeting or the product demo or the pitch or whatever. And then we get there and we do what we think we're supposed to do, but the client's kind of underwhelmed. You've got a mantra in the book. You actually have a character, an avatar in the book. That kind of talks to this.

MILT.

Tell me a little bit about what's, what's a MILT?

What's MILT, right. So—

And is it contagious?

No, MILT, MILT is, MILT's my co-author, if you will, of the book, my doppelganger, if you will. But I talk about selling with MILT. And so selling with MILT is, MILT is an acronym for Maximum Impact in the Least Time. So what you're trying to do is say every interaction I have with the customer, I need to achieve maximum impact In the least time.

So it's not just get the meeting.

It's not just get a meeting. Yeah, you have to— your goal should be to create value for the customer in every interaction. So every time you talk to a customer, it's a zero-sum game, right? It's like rolling the dice. You're either going to win or you're going to lose. And the customer is cataloging the wins and the losses. Think about that for a second. So every time you interact with a customer, it's a win or a loss. You get too many losses in the loss column, you're out. So let's talk examples of what is a loss interaction. Hi, Mr. Prospect, this is Andy calling. Yeah, haven't talked to you for a couple weeks, just want to check in and see what's going on.

The famous howdy-doody call.

Howdy-doody call, right?

Because the sales guy, I can now tell my sales manager I did 20 howdy-doody calls.

I called my prospect today.

Zero value to the client.

Zero value. Actually negative value. It's wasted his time, right?

Okay.

And so it gets back to the topic we talked about once before is that customers have a limited amount of time to deal with the sellers. And you have to be respectful of that time, right? So that's why you have to have maximum impact in the least time. You want to consume the least amount of time possible.

So how would I do that different? So, no, I mean, we joke about a howdy-doody call, but every now and then a salesperson will look through their book of business and go, oh, I haven't talked to so-and-so in a while. I should. It's been 60 days or whatever. Now, what you're saying is find a reason to have impact.

So— Well, one of the ways you can have impact as a seller, one is that Customers, well, customers need data to make a decision, right?

Okay.

So you have to think, well, how— what can I provide them that helps them move forward in their buying process, right? What is the data, the information they can use? So one of the ways I talk about that is that you've provided them a bunch of content, and the content is your product information. It could be some white papers about— that you or people within your company wrote. It could be maybe some customer testimonials. But your customers, assuming they're pre-educated, themselves, like everybody has, have sort of the same problem that general consumers have on the internet these days, which is lots of content, no context, right? That's what pundits talk about the internet. The problem with consumers is we've got all this information, we're drinking from this fire hose of information online, and we don't know how to synthesize—

Drowning in data, but I have no information.

Right. That's right. We don't know how to synthesize all that information into actionable data that has a beneficial impact on our lives. Well, your customers are the exact same thing, right? You know, they went and they pre-educated themselves, they shopped online for your product, service, and various others, maybe overwhelmed with data at one point. What they're really crying out for is context, right? So one of the ways you can create value for your prospect is provide them some information that has some contextual value to help them put their decision they have to make into some sort of context. So it could be, gosh, if you're in a technology field, you know, it could be what's gonna be the evolution of the technology within your space, right?

Yeah.

What's gonna be the impact on companies in their industry investing in technology over a 5 to 10 year period, you can go set Google Alerts, right? If you're a sales guy and you have a prospect, what you should do is you should be setting Google Alerts relative to their industry, the decision they have to make about your technology. You could set 3 or 4 Google Alerts and get all this information every day. And then there are tools that exist. There's a company called Visible Gains whose tool I like up in Massachusetts. It enables you to create very quickly, one click, is create a personalized information portal for your prospect, for every one of your prospects. So what you do is you put that link in there. Put the link to some article you found that's relevant to what they're trying to do. It sends an email to the customer, your portfolio has been updated.

So you get one click, maximum impact, least amount of time.

Right, right. And then the customer gets it. They know, they've already known they have this portfolio, so you're not spamming them. And then you get analytics. You get to look and see, gosh, what information have they looked at within that? Did they look at this piece you sent them? Oh yeah, they spent 20 minutes on it. Great. Maybe I'll give them another one like that. But there's no excuse for just calling the customer with no cover, calling them what I call bear calling. There's just no reason to do it. There's always something that you can provide them that helps create value for them. It just requires thought. That's the role of selling.

So to sum that up, we've got bye-bye howdy-doody and hello mail.

Yeah, and I think the key thing is selling is a thinking person's game. You can't do it by rote. There's all these tools. I wish I had had the internet when I was just starting my career on this because I mean, I killed it as it was, but I would have really killed it if I'd had that information.

Great. Thanks so much.

Thanks.

Andy Paul, founder of Zero Time Selling and author of Zero Time Selling as well. Thanks.