Selling Value to Price Focused Clients. Sales training with Ryan Dohrn
In this episode of the Mr. Revenue Show, Ryan Dohrn delivers a rapid‑fire series of practical sales tactics aimed at helping sellers win against price‑focused prospects. He begins by emphasizing the importance of articulating clear value propositions and using "bridge statements" that connect features to concrete business outcomes, thereby reducing price objections. He then outlines a low‑cost LinkedIn prospecting system—connecting, following, commenting, and leveraging LinkedIn’s notification to stay top‑of‑mind. Dohrn shares his favorite AI workflow: prompting large language models to ask clarifying questions before answering, which he claims yields higher‑quality outputs. For client retention, he recommends having senior leaders make personalized outreach calls or voicemails to top accounts, arguing that this signals importance and uncovers hidden issues. He defends the continued relevance of phone calls, describing a voicemail strategy that drives email replies. Finally, he discusses using AI to learn the top ten personality types and adapting sales style (e.g., pacing, listening) to match a prospect’s communication style. The episode closes with a call for speaking engagements and a teaser for the next show about the "death of the elevator pitch."
Chapters
Welcome friends and fans to another edition of the Mr. Revenue Show. Glad to have you with us for another week of fun in the sales business. Let's get started with our quick sales tip of the week. Friends, never forget in the sales business, price is what they pay and value is what they're going to get. If you're great at explaining value, it's not that price is never in the pool of consideration, But people typically will pay for, or will pay more for, things they find valuable. So it's incumbent upon us as sellers, whether you're in the insurance business or media advertising business or the car business, whatever it is, we want to make sure that we're very clear on the value that someone will receive for the price that they pay. I see it all the time. I think that a lot of us in the sales business, we think that the clients we're talking to— and I hate to be mean or anything— I feel like sometimes we think they're smarter than they actually are. We kind of feel like they're going to understand exactly what it is that they're saying, and I have— what we're saying. I have found that is not the case. That's why I share advice like unshare your Zoom calls a lot, ask for clarification, ask things like, hey, how am I doing? Am I explaining this well? Way more than, what questions do you have? The other thing though is bridging from value over to exact results. All right, so a lot of times what I want to do is be able to explain the value proposition, be brief, but then also say things like, how this impacts your business is, or how this could impact your business is. Those bridge statements allow us to go from features To value, allow us to go from value to the price that they're being paid. Get really good at those bridge statements. How this impacts you is, how this could impact you, what this means to your business is, how this could impact your business. Here's something you might find value in. Any of those type of statements, friends, always help you stand out in the value game. Now, don't forget this little extra bonus sales tip for you. If it always comes down to price on every sales call, if it always comes down to price, step back a step, look in the mirror and ask yourself this: am I doing a great job of explaining the value? Because if your value proposition is clear, it's not that price will never come up, but price will not come up as often. Get clear on that value, friends, and I think you're going to go further. Way, way faster. All right, here comes your prospecting tip of the week. All right, so let's just say that you have 30 people on your prospect list. Have you connected with all of those people on LinkedIn? Have you followed all of their companies on LinkedIn? Are you using LinkedIn as a way to put your name, your company name in your customer's inbox? Friends, I truly do believe that LinkedIn is by far one of the best sales tools out there. I truly believe that LinkedIn, even without AI, LinkedIn, an amazing, amazing tool. And I'm not saying you gotta pay for Sales Navigator. It's great. I'm just saying that you can put yourself in front of your potential customers and your regular customers in a very, very easy way. Follow them, like their comments, share things, repost things, put yourself in front of those customers. See, don't forget what happens is if you comment on a LinkedIn post, the person that made that post is going to get an email from LinkedIn, which is going to totally get through to them in almost all cases, and it's going to say Ryan Dohrn commented on your post. It doesn't tell them what I said. So they're going to see my name in their inbox, and then they're going to need to click on that to get over and see what it is that I said. Friends, if you don't believe me, give it a try for a couple of weeks. LinkedIn, friends, it is gold out there in the sales business. All right, so how about your sales tech tip of the week, friends? As you know, I am a huge fan of AI. I use it consistently all day long. 2 of my favorites, I do like Perplexity. I like ChatGPT, the paid version of that. And of course, I use Claude for a lot of my book writing, blogs, and really tough tasks. But one of the prompts that I like is I want AI to ask me clarifying questions when I ask it to do something for me so that it can give me back a really good answer. So if you're in the prompt box, What I want you to consider is this. In your favorite large language model, your favorite chatbot, say, before giving me a response, please ask me 5 clarifying questions, or 3, or whatever, to give me a better answer. When you do that, friends, it's gonna ask you clarifiers so that it can work harder for you. See, don't forget, and I'm sure the AI folks are gonna disagree with me, and that's fine. I'm, I'm right. When it is— AI is always looking to give you a fast response. It's looking, what can I do to give you something back really, really fast? Because if it's not fast, which we all know that Claude is super slow, if it's not fast like ChatGPT or Gemini, are people actually gonna wait around for it? And the answer is no. So AI is always looking for a shortcut. It's always looking for the fastest way to get you out of its queue, to get data center time freed up for the next person that is coming along. So because of that, it doesn't ask you many clarifying questions. And I'm just here to tell you, you need to tell it to ask you clarifying questions. It doesn't have to be 5. It can be 3 or 2, but make it work harder for you. Now, keep in mind, it's always gonna work harder if you're paying for the service. So a lot of you, you're gonna find pretty quickly here, if you haven't already, that in order for you to use AI for free, you're gonna have to watch advertisements. Right? So maybe you're down with that. I love advertising, but when I'm using AI, no, I don't wanna sit there and have to watch ads in the process. So keep in mind, friends, tell AI, ask it to ask you clarifying questions, friends, and I think it's going to make a big improvement in your sales game and what AI gives you back. All right, how about our retention idea of the week? Now, you're gonna like this idea as a seller. Your boss is not gonna like this idea, but I have found it to be very effective in retaining customers. At least once a year, maybe even quarterly, I like to ask my company owner, my publisher, my VP of sales— I want them to reach out to my customers and I want them to say, how are you? How are you doing? Thank you so much for your business. How is Ryan doing? Is Ryan taking care of you? Now, a lot of you are like, whoa, time Time out, Dohrn. No, no, no. I do not want my boss calling my clients. Friends, if you don't have confidence that your boss is not going to mess something up, are you really working for the right person? I mean, come on. Most supervisors should do a great job with customer service, especially when they're reaching out on behalf of the company. I hear from my customers all the time. Thank you so much for so-and-so reaching out. I mean, here's the good news. If you're the boss in this situation, you're probably going to get voicemail, what, 99.9% of the time. So just leave a really nice voicemail thanking them for their business and telling them to reach out if they have any problems or concerns with, with me. It's not about finding out if I'm doing a good job or not, because I'm always going to do a good job. It's about your customer hearing from people up the chain of command at your business. They will find it to be impressive because most Companies don't do this. Now, the bosses out there, don't get lazy and do a mass email. This is personalized outreach to your top 10, 20 clients a couple times a year just to double-check that things are going well. As a salesperson, I might think things are going well. What if they're not? Then I actually want to know about that as well. Don't forget, friends, when it comes to retention, customer service is expected. Retention are the things you do beyond customer service to keep your customers for a lifetime. All right, now it's time for our listener and viewer questions of the week. Love those questions. Keep them coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. And because we're doing the show here almost every week, just depends on my travel schedule, almost every week, we're getting a lot more questions answered. So here comes the next viewer listener question. From Trevor from Georgia. Hey Trevor, how you doing? Thanks for your question. Trevor is kind of funny here, and this is what he wrote. Come on, Ryan, we all know the telephone is old school at best. Do you really call people and actually get them to call you back? Do you really call people and they actually pick up the phone? Be real with me, shoot me the straight truth. So Trevor, from me to you, to everybody that watches and listens to the show, I do exaggerate, you know, I am in sales, I'm prone to do that, but I'll always tell you the truth, Trevor, because I believe, Trevor, you can handle the truth. All right, have times changed? Times changed as it relates to phone calls, absolutely. But do I still call people? Yes, so much so that I have this little kind of holder that holds my phone right here, right next to me. That's how many calls I'm making. It's right here. I don't have to worry about a headset. I'm I'm calling people right here on this little device that is sitting next to me. Now, do as many people pick up? No. But voicemail can be a differentiating factor. I want people to hear my charisma, my spontaneity, how much fun I am in my voicemails. What I do is I use voicemail to get an email reply. I might say, hey Trevor, you don't need to call me back. Sorry I missed you. I sent you an email with the subject line of blah, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah. Love to have you reply to the email. So the answer is yes, my superstar sellers do pick up the phone. The other thing is, uh, Trevor and everybody out there, um, you know, a lot of times people just zoomed out. I mean, they're tired of Teams meetings. I just was talking to my son on the phone and he's in the Navy and he's like, oh man, so many Teams meetings, right? And I'm like, yeah, I mean, it's just a part of our everyday life as it even is in the military. Ask yourself this: is the phone there for real? Does everyone have a phone? The answer is yes. Is it a cell phone? Almost always. So just be asking yourself, could you create an even deeper personal connection by actually picking up the phone? The other thing is you do need to set a precedent. We've been talking about that on YouTube, that you're short— I mean, that your phone calls are going to be short. And so if people think, oh gosh, here's Ryan calling again, This is probably going to be a 60-minute phone call, then they're not going to take the call. So set those precedents up in advance and say, hey, I want to be respectful of your time, thought I'd just reach out for 3 or 4 minutes. So Trevor, I encourage you, no matter how young or old you are, make sure you're picking up that phone, connecting with people in an auditory way. People really, really appreciate it. And if we get back to using the phone a lot more, you know, like ring ring, you know, I think we'll do less Zoom calls. And I think what that's gonna do is make people be a little more, um, they're gonna be a little more willing to pick up that call cuz Zoom calls require a commitment, right? I mean, that's the truth. So don't give up on the phone, Trevor. I'm not gonna stop talking about the phone. I mean, when I do, you'll be one of the first people to know. Keep your questions coming, friends. Ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, one of my favorite parts of the show. You know I love my brain work tip of the week, and I've heard from a lot of you, you like this little section as well. One of the things that I did this last week that was super helpful from a brain perspective is I asked ChatGPT to walk me through the 10 main personality types that really exist kind of out there. I think the FBI would say there's thousands of personality types. I'm sure psychologists and psychiatrists would agree as well, I would think. I don't, um, you know, I don't know how many personality types, but I asked it to give me some feedback and teach me a little bit about the main 10 personality types. And, and I was floored, friends. I just didn't realize how many personality types were out there and how easy it is to actually identify those personality types. Just a real brief example. Somebody that's a listener— people that— like, I'm not a listener. I just— I mean, I don't listen very well. I talk well, but I don't always listen very well. Ask my wife of 30-some years. So there's listeners. When you notice somebody is a listener, it doesn't mean that they're out of touch. It doesn't mean they're not paying attention. It just means that they're absorbing information. There's nothing wrong with that. So if you're someone like me that tends to flood people with information and I'm dealing with a listener type of person, I need to give them time to absorb. Check this out. People typically absorb at the rate that they talk. I talk really, really fast. I absorb things really, really fast. People that talk a little bit slower tend to, to take that information in and absorb a little bit slower. It doesn't mean they're dense. It just means that's their rate of absorption. Now keep in mind, I talk fast, so I might mess some things up. I listen very quickly, so I might miss some things. People that are listeners, they tend to listen for a reason, listen for a purpose. So what I need to do is adjust my selling style to their listening style. So I might need to pause more. I might need to recognize, yo, Ryan, like, slow down, dude. I mean, you're going way, way too fast. So, from a brainworks perspective, I thought it was a great exercise. Go to ChatGPT or Gemini, whatever, Copilot, and ask it to teach you about the various, maybe the top 10 personality types that are out there. Because I really believe if you can get in sync with people, you can almost always sell them so much more. All right, friends, that's our show for the week. I've heard from a lot of you that you like this new format. It's short, it's direct, it's to the point. You notice I'm not having a bunch of guests on the show, and I hope you like that as well. I want these programs to be airtight and jam-packed with information that you can put into practice right away. All right, friends, I really need you to invite me to your sales meetings. Invite me to your sales conferences. I want to come and get you pumped up. I just was in Pittsburgh with my friends Betsy and Dan and Trish, and we got their team pumped up. And by the way, Pittsburgh Very cool city if you haven't visited there in a while. Lots of great restaurants and all that. But they told me the team was pumped up, and that, friends, is what I do. And by the way, it's probably more affordable than you might think to bring me in to work with your business. All right, we'll see you on the next show. The next video that's coming up is gonna be all about the death of the elevator pitch. So if you haven't checked that one out, be sure to watch the next show. All right, friends, God bless you. We'll see you. Bye. We'll see you on the next program next week!
