Ryan Dohrn explains how sharing and comparing—telling clients what others are doing—raises their expectations, reduces risk, and closes deals. He walks through examples in media, marketing, and software, stressing the ethical way to use benchmarking and FOMO in consultative sales.
What's going on, friends and fans? Ryan Dohrn here, your friendly neighborhood sales coach. This week we're talking about sharing and comparing. Everything we do in the sales business needs to be built around the model of sharing and comparing. Now, you can do this in an ethical way. The basis of sharing and comparing is using FOMO, fear of missing out, to drive conversations further and faster. Now, when I mention this, people a lot of times are like, oh, you know, I can't mention one client client to another client. Everything I'm proposing to you, friends, everything that I'm pitching to you is above board and highly ethical. I never would talk about what somebody did with us and is doing with us in the future. I only talk about what people did with us in the past. Whether you're selling insurance or you're selling media, you're selling marketing solutions or software, you have to get great at name dropping and sharing and comparing. All right, let me explain to you why. And those of you that are listening on the podcast as opposed to watching the YouTube channel, you won't see this example, but I have a white cord here that I'm holding in my hands. Okay? A one-way conversation is you and the client tugging back and forth. What do you want? I know what you want. I can deliver. What's your needs? I'm gonna give that back to you. What's your goals? I'm gonna meet those goals. I'll exceed them. You know, what's your desires? I'm gonna meet them. It's like a one-way conversation where you're taking a string or a cord and you're pulling that back and forth. Well, not only is that pretty boring, but it gets you the least amount of money. What? Well, if you ask somebody your goal, their goals and you fulfill their goals, you're their hero, but you haven't taken into account what others in the market are doing to be successful. So if somebody says to you, maybe you're one of my media customers selling marketing solutions, someone says, I need 50 leads. Okay, great, we can potentially deliver that. But what if 50 leads is not the industry standard? What if running campaigns should be generating 300 leads and they only asked for 50? Are you really going to accept that low of a bar? Instead, what you want to be talking with them about, sharing and comparing. We've worked with companies like yours. I understand that you want leads. That's great. We worked with this company, this company, this company. We're able to deliver 300 to 400 leads, and this is what it would potentially look like, what the cost would look like. Instead, what a lot of times happens is we're working on the lowest bar. When you ask somebody their budget, you're always working with the lowest bar because they don't really know what it takes to be successful. When you think about sales, It's, it's so consultative because your obligation— you're really obligated in the consultative sale to share and compare. Now let's just talk media for a second. I'm never gonna say, well, John Deere spent this amount of money with me, or Kubota Tractors spent this amount of money with me. That's not what I'm talking about. Instead, if I'm talking to another tractor manufacturer, hey, we've done great, had great success with John Deere, had great success with Kubota. We've run lead gen programs for them. We've done webinars for them. We've done all kinds of additional traditional marketing mixes for them. They participated in our events. This is what they loved. See, that's all ethical and above board, and what it does is it makes the new customer feel like, wow, hey, I can really trust them. This makes a lot of sense. This is gonna work for me. It's gonna be successful. Sharing and comparing, friends, is so important in everything that you do. All right, now I know I got a lot of folks that watch that you're in the software business. Talk about that for a second. If you want to have a string one-way conversation between 2 people, you can do that, but it's flat, it's soft, it lacks a lot of substance and pizzazz, and it doesn't use FOMO to drive the conversation forward. See, what I want to do is I want to say, so this is the software solution, this is how it might meet your needs, but let me tell you about 3 other companies that are using this tool and what they're loving about it. Would that be helpful? I've never had someone say, no, don't tell me about anybody else. We have solved problems for other people just like you with this software or with this marketing solution. Sharing and comparing is not only ethical, it's a part of being a consultative salesperson. My encouragement to you would be share and compare. Stay above board. Make sure everything you're sharing is ethical, but make sure your charisma For the love that you have about your customers, it actually comes through to your new customers. They want to be loved as well. And when we realize in today's environment that everybody's making a lot more decisions from an emotional perspective, it's even more important to share and compare. If we're dealing with economic uncertainty, which we're dealing with right now, people are reluctant to spend money that they potentially have or don't have. And when you use FOMO and you mention others that have been successful working with you, you're reducing their risk. You're bringing their risk level down because— Because the return on investment comes off of your shoulders because you already have on your shoulders the success stories of other customers. Sharing and comparing. I talk about it all the time, but I don't see enough people doing it. Friends, you can do it. It's ethical. It's above board. It's the essence of consultative selling, and I'm just here to tell you, from Uncle Ryan to all of you, share And compare. It is the spice of sales life. Thanks so much, friends. If I could be of help to you, reach out to me over at ryandohrn.com. Love to come motivate your sales team and be a part of making your team successful the rest of this year. Take care. We'll see you next week. Bye.
