Deal stuck? 4 ways to get clients over the finish line with sales coach Ryan Dohrn
In this solo podcast episode Ryan Dohrn walks listeners through a step‑by‑step framework for moving prospects from initial contact to a closed sale. He begins by framing the sales process as a "client journey" – a road trip that the prospect must trust you to take. He stresses the importance of managing the risk‑to‑reward ratio and of warming prospects before asking for a meeting through LinkedIn engagement, newsletters, trade‑show touches, and other low‑friction interactions. Once a meeting is secured, Dohrn advocates a concise three‑point agenda: (1) showcase happy‑client examples, (2) discuss price and options, and (3) ask for a decision or schedule a follow‑up, thereby keeping the prospect on the “road”. He then answers two listener questions: (a) Ron’s timing objection, where Dohrn teaches how to set timing aside, secure a short discovery call, and uncover the real objection (often budget), while reinforcing the use of happy‑client proof; (b) Jazz’s Zoom‑fatigue problem, where he shares four tactics – frequent share/unshare, white‑screen pauses with live annotation, injecting humor or personal touches, and using video testimonials – plus interactive questioning to keep attention. Throughout the episode he promotes his Sales Coach app (free two‑week trial) and other training resources, reminding listeners that sales success requires a clear plan, consistent strategy, and continual motivation.
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Hey friends, welcome to another episode. Here's what we've got coming up. We're going to focus in on the client journey, meaning what is your client going to do? What journey will they take before they buy from you? And what can you do along that journey to make sure they arrive safe, they arrive feeling secure, and in the end they arrive and buy from you? Then we've got 2 listener and viewer questions that have been sent in. A question from Ron. He's really concerned about the timing. A lot of clients are saying, hey, the timing of this time of year is just not right for them. So Ron, we've got some answers for you. And then we've got a question from Jazz who says he has no trouble getting people to Zoom meetings, but then Jazz is saying, hey, people are kind of tuning out. They're not paying attention during the meeting. What do I do? Friends, I think we've got some great answers. They're all coming up on this month's show. Stick around, stay close. Here we go. Live from the BrainSwell Media Studios, this is the Ryan Dohrn Business Show. Hey friends, welcome to this month's episode. I sure appreciate all the love and support that you show me here on YouTube, over on Spotify, iTunes, you name it. I just really appreciate all of your comments and your feedback. And keep those questions coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, your listener questions are coming up. Now let's dig in on the client's journey. The journey that your client is going to take, unbeknownst to them, the trip they're going to take to buy from you. Now wait a minute, that's really an important part, right? Because when you reach out to somebody, you're asking them to go on a trip with you they didn't plan. They didn't plan the trip, they didn't know they were going on a trip, and they don't really know you as their tour guide. So why should they go on this trip with you? Think about that for a second. Let that kind of sink in. You're asking somebody, a buyer of yours, to go on a trip with you. You're asking them to trust you. You're asking them to get in the vehicle with you. You're asking them to go on this road trip. You're like in charge of the radio. I mean, the whole trip is really planned by you. So you've got to be asking yourself, what can I do to reduce risk? And increase reward. It's called the risk-to-reward ratio. It's kind of like a little bit of a balancing act. Okay. We want risk to be low. We want reward to be high. Or risk to be low, reward to be high. Whatever your circumstance is. Now, as you are planning this journey for your customer that they didn't even know they were going to go on, you've got to be doing some pre-trip planning. So if all you're doing is just reaching out to people, phone call, email, just beating them up, they don't know you. They don't know why they should get in the car with you. They don't know why they should trust you. You're not providing them value, just asking them for a meeting. Would it be worth us talking about this? Okay, they don't know you. So you've got to be thinking about what can I do to warm this client up before the journey, increase trust, make them feel safe. And so one of the things I love to do is I'm always connecting with my customers on LinkedIn. I follow them on LinkedIn. I follow their companies. And then when they share things, I like those things. I'll repost those things. I'll say things like, oh, great information. Thanks for sharing. I might say, love this, if it's appropriate. I might say, this exclamation point, saying like, this is it. I might share it without comment or with comments. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You're like, well, Ryan, if I got to do this for one client, I've got to do it for all my clients. Okay, so sales is hard work. I mean, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, right? And they're not, and we always have to remember that. So there needs to be some warm-up strategies. Perhaps it's adding them to your marketing e-newsletter. Maybe it's reaching out with some helpful advice or thoughts, liking and sharing their things on LinkedIn, meeting them real briefly at a trade show without jumping on them as a salesperson. All of those things are warm-up strategies. If you're like a lot of my customers in the media business, maybe you're selling magazines, magazine advertising, making sure they're on the comp list, and things along those lines to warm up that journey. Now, let's just say that we've done that, we feel comfortable that they probably know a little bit about who we are. Now what we've got to do is we've got to try to get them to get in the car with us and begin this journey. The fastest way to get somebody in the proverbial car, as I'm using as an example, is to increase trust by proving value and by showing relevancy. See, there's a lot of circumstances where you're asking for sort of generic meetings about generic things, and you're not specifying how much time you actually need from them. So their default is they're like, well, I don't have 60 minutes to meet with this Dohrn guy. So, there's 3 things that I like to do. One, I'm always mentioning highly relevant ways that I can help them and I can help their business. The second thing is reducing risk is by me mentioning a lot of happy clients we already have. Now, I know what you're thinking. Well, Ryan, I mean, I can't talk to one client about another. That's unethical. Okay. So, I would never ask you to do anything that's even borderline unethical. What I am asking you to consider though is we got to reduce that risk. One of the fastest ways to reduce risk, relevancy, proving that other people have had success. So whatever other clients have had success. So whatever it is you're selling, I want to encourage you to be mentioning your happy clients. And there's very few circumstances where mentioning happy clients actually works against you. There's all kinds of circumstances Where mentioning happy clients actually works in your favor. All right, so we've got them in the car, we've mentioned happy clients, they're feeling good about us, and they gave us a 5 or 10-minute meeting. That's the next stop along the journey. The journey to them buying from us is going to have potholes, it's going to have hiccups, it's going to have hills that go up and down. What we don't want to have happen though is we don't want them to get off at a road stop and then run away and then not get back in the car. So, the next thing you've got to be asking yourself is, what does your pacing look like? What does your rhythm look like? Are you able to show them what the path to success actually looks like? Now, a lot of you know that my dad for many, many years was a preacher of a pretty big church. And I always asked him a lot of questions about the sermons that he did. And one of the things he shared with me is that he would always use 3 points inside of most of the sermons he preached. And the reason for that is because he wanted people to see, he wanted his congregation to see that there was a path he was following. And if they stuck through these 3 points, eventually he's going to be done speaking. Because there's always this fear, you know, for those of you that go to church, there's always this fear when the preacher starts talking, you're like, oh boy, when is this person going to be done, right? So when you show somebody the path that you're going to take them on, It gives them comfort in knowing, oh, okay, here's the path that we're gonna go on. So when I host a meeting with somebody along their journey to buy with me, I'm very specific about my agenda. I'm very specific about where I'm gonna take this call. As a matter of fact, there's 3 main points in each of my agendas. The first, I'd love to share with you some examples of other customers that are very, very happy with us. Would that be helpful? People always say, yeah, that'd be great. The second thing is, I'm not going to leave to create some proposal. I know what this costs. I'm going to talk to you about the price, because you know that's what they want to know anyway. I'm going to talk with you about the price and what your options are. And then the third, because I'm showing them the path, the third thing I'm going to do is, I'm at the end of our conversation, I'd love for you to say yes. You might say no, that's okay, no problem. But more than likely, you're probably going to say, I need to think about it. And we'll set up a follow-up plan that makes sense to both of us. Sound good? Give them a little thumbs up and they're like, yes. So while I think that some of the things I'm sharing right now will actually impact Jazz, who has a question coming up that we're going to answer about Zoom calls and Zoom fatigue, I feel like if we give people a path that we're going to follow on the sales call we're going to have with them, that path becomes a little more clear. They tend to pay a little bit more attention. Okay, so we're going on down this journey. We're taking them down the journey with us. We present our materials. We talk about our success stories. We get to the point where they're like, hey, this is great. I need to think about it. This is the next bump, pothole, or rest area kind of on this journey that they're taking with us. Friends, it's very important for you not to let them control that exit. Once they leave the roadway, boy, it is difficult to get them back on the on-ramp to success. So, what I like to do at the end of our conversation is, what is the best way for me to follow up with you? Let's create a follow-up plan together. And then I really want to drill in on a date, a time, but I also only need 5 minutes for that follow-up. That follow-up meeting is, what questions do you have? What's your answer? Love to move forward with you because we're getting close to the end of the journey where they're going to buy from us. But we've also got to control that because if we don't control it, they get off the off-ramp and we can't get them back on. So we have to vividly control that. Now, what's interesting is the consumer journey doesn't end just when they buy from you. I mentioned that earlier, but it really goes on for customer service, retention, and all those kind of things. Now, because I don't want to have a podcast that's an hour and a half long, I can't really drill in— I'm not going to drill in every intimate detail along this journey. I just want to give you some thoughts to think about. What does the journey look like that you're going to take your customers on before they buy from you? If you don't know what that journey looks like, if you don't know what the roadmap looks like, a lot of times, friends, they're not going to know either. And that's why it's so important for us to pay attention to the journey, to look at all the pitfalls, the, the roadmap. What does the roadmap look like? What do the potholes look like? What are potential distractions that are going to be on that journey? And iron it out, lay it out, and create a strategy for that journey all along the way. Hey, do you need to have your boss involved in that journey? Do you need to have a designer involved in the journey? An engineer? A developer? All along that journey, be thinking about what does the roadmap to success actually look like? Because if you don't control the journey, guess what they do? They either pull off the side of the road and never get back on, or they take control of the wheel. And guess what happens then? They take control of the wheel and they go the direction that they want to go, which usually does not lead to sales success for all of you. All right, all the various components of the sales process we've talked about on the podcast or here on the YouTube channel, so check all those out. Give us a thumbs up, give us a subscribe, because we want YouTube to know that we're doing good things as we talk about sales here on the show. All right, you got more questions, reach out to me, ryan@ryandohrn.com. We've also got all kinds of training online, and we'd love to be getting your questions because we might just feature them here on the show. All right, don't forget, the journey can be long, it can be tough, but make sure you map it out. And we'll see you next time. If you want to be highly successful. All right, we've got listener questions coming up. We've got a question from Ron, and Ron is really focused in on the timing of things this year, and he's saying the timing just isn't working for him. And then the next question we have here, I've got on the computer from Jazz, is really all about people being Zoom fatigued. He gets the calls, but then they're not paying attention. What should we do? We've got your listener and viewer questions coming up next. Stick around and stay close. We will be right back. All right, we're back. Be right back. Hey, welcome back everybody. Glad to have you here on the podcast as well as watching on the YouTube channel. Keep your questions coming in, ryan@ryandorn.com. Love to get all of your questions. Hey, before we get to Ron's question about timing, have you downloaded my sales app yet. So over on the Apple Store, the App Store, it's available. You get 2 weeks for free. It's daily motivational training that you can download on that app, 2 weeks for free. And then we almost have the Android version done, so be patient with us on that and we'll get that up as soon as we can. I upload all those tips because, you know, sometimes I just need some motivation in the day to keep things going forward. All right, Ron up in Minnesota sending this question to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Hey, Ryan, I sure appreciate your show and all your help. I'm getting from people that my timing is always off. It seems that I'm always calling at the wrong time, and I don't necessarily mean the time of day. I mean the time of year as it relates to their buying cycle. Any advice is appreciated. So, Ron, I've got several thoughts on this because I really actually thought you meant the time of day was what you meant. But as I dug into your question further, I realize you're talking about the time of year. So one of the first things to recognize, friends, is what is the sales cycle of the community, the industry, or the client that you're trying to reach out to? Now, one of the things I don't want you to do, Ron, is when someone gives you this objection, I don't want you to say to them, well, when would be a good time? Because it could just be that the timing objection is baloney. It's really not a legitimate objection. So, if I'm speaking with somebody on the phone, I'll say to them, setting timing aside, could I get 15 or 20 minutes to show you what I've got so that when the timing is right, you'll have my information to consider? Now, what you've done is you haven't deflected the objection. You've just set the objection aside for a minute. You validate it and you've said, okay, I'm listening to you. I hear that you're saying the timing isn't right. No problem. Let's set the timing aside. Could I get 15 or 20 minutes to share with you my opportunity? That way, when the timing is right, you will be able to have the information to consider. Now, if the objection of timing isn't the real objection, now they're going to give you the real objection. They might say, well, yeah, it's, it's not timing as much as we don't have the budget for this right now. Okay, we haven't even explained to him what it costs yet. So now we need to focus in on value and mentioning other customers. So now I push the budget aside. I say, okay, no problem. I understand that finances might be tight right now with economic uncertainty in play. Setting timing aside, setting budget aside, I'm just looking for 15 minutes to show you what's working for Company A, Company B, Company C. I think it's something you might find extremely valuable. What do you think? Now, what you're doing is you're skillfully pushing the objections aside to try to keep momentum in this conversation going. Remember back to earlier in our podcast, earlier in the video, where we talked about the journey people are going to take? Sometimes it takes a while to get that journey going. Now, after handling those 2 objections, Normally someone's going to tell you really what the objection is, or they're potentially going to say, yeah, I guess I've got 15 minutes, or they might just say, you know what, I'll be honest with you, I'm just not that interested. Now my response to that is always to mention other customers. Thank you for sharing that with me. I can appreciate your lack of interest. I just have a little concern. I know that Company A, Company B, Company C are really liking their results with us, and And I just would encourage you to give me a few minutes to take a couple minutes to just see what it is we have going. What about 5 minutes of time? Now, what I do is I try 3 times. So, I get 3 nos before I let them go. And there's a podcast on that, by the way. 3 nos before you let them go. Here's the thing to remember. If you're polite and you're good with your salesmanship, friends, you will be successful. Most people appreciate good salesmanship. Now, recognize most business owners, most companies you're talking to, if you're good in the sales business and you've got good strategy and good salesmanship, most people respect that. Now, I'm not asking you to jump back through the phone, jump back through the email. I'm just telling you, Ron, and everybody else that's listening, you can be a raging success in sales. If you have a plan, if you have a strategy— what I find is that a lot of times people are just running and gunning. They don't have a plan, they don't have a strategy, they're just dialing for dollars. And when you do that— and there's a certain part of dialing for dollars that makes sense— if that's all you're doing, you're never going to be a raging success in the sales business. You need a strategy and you need a plan. Now, Ron, last thing to share with you is Know the timing of your industry, because some industries buy at the beginning of the year, some buy in the fall, some buy in the summertime. So identify that first, and that's almost always going to give you even more success. So Ron, thanks for your question sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, next listener question comes in from Jazz out in Phoenix. Hey Jazz, what a cool name, by the way. I wish I had a cool name like that. All right, Jazz's question is this: Ryan, I have no trouble getting meetings. I get people on Zoom, no problem at all, but then I lose them on the call. They seem uninterested and they just don't want to engage. Any help is appreciated. So Jazz, this is a super common problem with Zoom and Teams and GoTo and whatever service, Google Meet, whatever it is that you use. So a lot of times when a Zoom conversation begins, you click share screen, you share your PowerPoint, and you reduce yourself and your customer into those little windows that are at the top. So you take your big beautiful face and you make it really small and they're really small as well. So what I like to do is 2 things. Well, actually 3 things. The first thing is I share and unshare a lot. So I share my screen and then I unshare my screen, share my screen, unshare my screen, and I'm really, really good at it. So that's the first thing that I like to do. The second thing is in my presentations, I almost always include white screens. So just a blank screen. Then what I'd like to do is some of the charts, and the graphs that I typically use, I use the annotate or pen tool and I draw on the screen. So a lot of you know I do a bunch of work in the marketing solutions business with media companies. What I like to do is I take my pen and I like to draw a triangle on the screen and show that there's 3 main things that people typically do. And the moment you draw something on the screen, people begin to pay attention. And then the third thing is, I like to include little funny things inside of my presentation to reengage. Sometimes I'll put fun pictures. Sometimes I'll mention things that are fun about personal hobbies that I have. Maybe I'll mention things I saw on their LinkedIn profile, but I try to include those things in the conversation as well. So, look at your slide deck and figure out if there are some fun ways to be able to present some of that information. Now, one of the other things that I do— so I guess that's a 4th thing I like to do— if I have testimonials, especially video testimonials, I like to put those in my Zoom presentations as well. Now, keep in mind, once you start recording the call or you share the call, you have to go under audio and share the system audio. Now, not all tools, video tools, do this extremely well. A lot of times you have to share your system's audio. But what I've noticed is if I can share things that are video-oriented, people tend to perk up and they tend to really pay attention to the screen. Now, Jazz, at the end of each point that I make on my presentation, I unshare the screen and I don't say, do you have any questions? Because they're probably going to say no. Instead, Jazz, I ask things like, How am I doing? Am I going too fast? How is this resonating with you? Can you find value in that? I might ask, could you see how you could use that as you're growing your business or as you're trying to save time or money? I just don't ask the question, do you have any questions? Because typically they're just going to say no. So, Jazz, a lot of the time you're going to lose people because, well, maybe the presentation is too long. Maybe you've got some slides in there like the history of our company. Get rid of that stuff. Nobody cares. But maybe you're not engaging and creating an engaging experience. And if you can get real good at that, then you can totally have a much better presentation. I did a video during COVID It's still relevant. A video during COVID called How Not to Be a Webcam Zombie. How Not to Be a Webcam Zombie. And I'll put a link to that down in the description down below. But that's a video that explains how to set yourself up so that you can have lights and you don't need a fancy microphone, but you can have lights and you can set yourself up to be highly successful as you're making those virtual presentations. So Jazz and Ron, good luck out there. And friends, keep your questions coming, ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, friends, that is the show for this month. We sure appreciate all the love and support that you show over here to all of us. Love to come to your sales conference, speak at your national sales meeting. It's probably a lot more affordable than you might think because I absolutely love to come and encourage you and encourage your team. Find out more over at ryandohrn.com. Before the end of the day, make sure you go to the App Store and download the Sales Coach app. Search for Ryan Dohrn or the Sales Coach on the App Store. Get 2 weeks for free. It's going It's gonna keep you motivated because never forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. And it are not. We're not crazy. I used to say that. We're not crazy. This is a great career, friends. It'll feed your family for a lifetime. All right, connect with me over on LinkedIn or over at ryandohrn.com. Get out there and sell something. Make us all proud. See you next time.
