Quick Without Content Is the Road to Failure - Thought Leadership Leverage

I'm Peter Winick, and today my guest is Andy Paul, who is the founder and author of Zero Time Selling, which is a 2011 top 3 sales and marketing book.

Thank you.

If it's later than 2011, which it is because it's 2012, it hasn't expired. It's still solid. It's still great stuff.

Always one of the top 3 books.

Always. For the rest of time. So salespeople have always been taught to be responsive. And the way that's typically been interpreted or applied is to respond quickly. So my client or my prospect calls me, I'm going to get back to them quickly. They ask a question, I'm going to answer it quickly. That's not right? You're saying something else. You have a formula.

Well, I have a different formula for responsiveness. Right. So—

So how do you define responsiveness today?

So traditional responsiveness in selling Yeah, the customer reaches out to me, I'm gonna get back to them quickly. And the problem with that is that just getting back to them without content, right, without an answer to the questions they have, isn't responsive. So I say responsiveness in selling today is the combination of information content and speed, right?

So it's not just speed.

It's not just speed.

So it's speed and the quality or the caliber of my response.

Absolutely. So, you know, if a customer calls you, you get a lead and you call the customer back and you don't have any content, Then you're not responsive because you haven't progressed the buying cycle at all, right?

But I, as the salesperson, think I've done the right thing. I've called them quickly, but the prospect might think, thanks for nothing, you just wasted my time.

You just wasted my time.

So we talked—

Strike one. Right. We talked in another session about selling with maximum impact in the least time, is that customers judge the quality of every interaction with the salesperson. And so that's a waste of their time, right? And so customers calculate this. Customers calculate a return on the time they invest In you as a salesperson, right? And we've done this as sellers. I certainly have done that. I've said, look, there are certain deals we're working on taking way too much time and too expensive to get. Well, customers are doing the inverse, right? They're saying, look, it's taking way too much time to get the information out of this seller. So gosh, what's it going to be like working with them after I give them the order? I mean, it's going to be horrible, right? Right.

It doesn't get better after they get the deal.

It doesn't get better after. It never gets better after you get the deal. So responsiveness, information content speed. So what the customer wants is the customer has a few questions they want answered. When they get in contact with you, you have to provide them The answers, right? So the way to do that, I talk about this in the book, is that you want to have the people that have the best knowledge of the product and the best industry expertise closest to the customer. They're the ones that are your frontline responders to the customer.

Now that's a big deal because in a lot of organizations that technical component that supports sales is kept somewhere in the basement or the dungeon and you only bring them out to the light of day for that 11th meeting with the client when they need The technician. You're saying, no, get them out quick?

Absolutely. So, I mean, think about it. Increasingly, sales is becoming an inside profession, right?

Yeah.

So, you know, not as much happening in the way of field sales. It is, you know, it's a perfect opportunity because, you know, quite frankly, yeah, I mean, I always had a client where our number one salesperson was a guy we brought in out of engineering. He was so painfully shy that literally you could walk by him in the hallway even after working with him for 2 or 3 years and he couldn't bring himself to say hi to you. But on the phone—

Which is the exact profile for a salesperson.

Right. Which, well, on the phone with a customer, He didn't have to be Mr. Social, right? He didn't have to have great interpersonal skills. They had questions, he had answers. He killed it. No one was better than him at selling them. That's really what the customer wanted, right? They didn't care about the other stuff. So if they really cared about playing golf and going out to lunch and so on, they would have been buying from another guy with another sales channel, right?

Mm-hmm.

But this is what they wanted. This is the avenue to purchase they wanted. You have to have these people. If it isn't the actual salespeople that you can train and give them the product knowledge and give them the industry expertise, make them— sort of the one that the buzzword du jour is that your salespeople have to be good business people.

Right.

Right? So, but that's true. Part of the good business people is you really know your industry. You have to know your product better than the customer. And to me, that's sort of the baseline for your salespeople. If your salespeople don't know your product better than your customer, You're always gonna have an issue, and you're gonna have a very expensive sales model. So if you can find these people, whether in support or you find them as new hires and train them, much easier to acquire some of the selling skills, right? Because the selling skills are more about being responsive, right? It's not about convincing. It's not about persuading. That's not what selling is. Selling is you provide data that people can use to make the right decisions, and you get rewarded for doing that.

And do it quick. And do it smart.

And do it smart.

Not quick and— quick in and of itself isn't gonna do it. Quick and smart is the world that we live in.

No, quick without content is the road to failure. Great.

Thanks so much. Andy Paul, Zero Time Selling. Thanks so much.

Thanks.