STOP asking, What’s your budget?

Hey there, friends and fans. Billion Dollar Sales Coach Ryan Dohrn here, and welcome to the Mr. Revenue Show, where we talk about sales issues facing sellers, warriors out there on the street, just like all of us. So let's get into it. Here comes your sales quick tip of the month. I'm one of those people, friends, that I'm very careful about the questions that I ask on a sales call. The title of the podcast this week is Stop Asking What's Your Budget. And let's talk about it because I am going to take some hate for this in the comments below, and that's okay. I want you to discuss this with your other sales warriors that are out there. All right, so why am I not a fan of asking somebody's budget when basically every book, sales book on the market, every sales trainer on the market has taught us, me included, to ask that question, what's your budget? The reason I don't like the question is because it doesn't allow me to be able to explain to that client or that prospect the reality of what something will cost. Instead, when you ask, what's your budget? You're asking that client's perception, their feeling about what something should cost. So, the reality in my world of marketing— so, I sell marketing solutions, a lot of you know that. The reality is, in any given category, in any given month, in my particular market, a software company might spend, say, $5,000 to $15,000 a month. Well, what if I ask, what's your budget? And they say, you know, like $1,500. Now, anything I say after that is going to sound expensive. So they're always going to be— I'm having to play defense against the objection of Well, I don't have the budget. It's too expensive. I'm not as big as them. I don't know where I'd find that money and those types of things. So instead, depending on what you sell, okay, it's important for you to recognize asking what's your budget forces you to live often in their unrealistic reality of actually what they think it's going to cost to purchase, buy, or work with You. So an alternative to that is I like to find out before I figure out a budget, I like to find out what world they want to play in. So do they want to solve big problems? Do they want to solve kind of medium-sized problems? Do they want to solve small problems? And you can ask about these problems in several different ways. So one of their problems might be competition. Maybe their competition is cheaper or more expensive. Well, let's just say that they need to battle really, really tooth to tooth, face to face, right? They need to battle with a competitor. Well, if they're in a battle, they're gonna have to spend at least as much, if not more, than their nearest competitor to fight a good fight. So whatever it is that you're selling, there's a circumstance out there. In my world, it's slightly easier to explain. Let me give you a real basic example. Let's say that in most cases, a company here in the Augusta, Georgia area might spend $2,000 to $5,000 a month on marketing solutions. Well, when I ask them what's their budget and they say $800 a month, their reality is different than the reality. Their reality is, well, I got $500, $600 to spend. The reality is it's going to cost $2,000 to $5,000 just to fight the good fight. So instead, what I want you to consider doing, depending on what you're selling out there, be asking yourself, what questions can I ask that will allow me or guide me to being able to explain the reality of working with us, the reality of what things actually cost, rather than what is their perception of the budget they should have set aside To be able to solve a problem or create a solution. And while I understand that that does require a little more brainpower because it's easy to say, what's your budget? You know, what's your budget? It forces you into a kind of an awkward situation in a lot of circumstances. Now, some of you might say, Ryan, it's a great qualifying question. Like, what's your budget? My budget's $1,500. Okay, our services are $5,000. If you don't have $5,000, we're not the right company for you. You could take that approach, or you could take what I'm suggesting, and that is let's ask questions that will guide someone towards the reality. So what might some of those questions be? I guess this wasn't such a quick tip. I should have been a little faster in explaining this. Okay, so some of the questions that you might ask when you think about competing against your nearest competitor, right? Do you want to fight them kind of face to face, head to head? Do you want to do more than them? Do you want to do less than them? That's kind of one of my go-to questions. Let's talk about the problems that your service, software, whatever might solve for somebody. Okay, so let's talk about the problems you're trying to find a solution to solve. So is it accounting problems? Is it customer service problems? Is it a technology problem? What's the problem you're trying to solve? Okay, is there somebody else out there that's already solving that problem? What do you need to do to be bigger, badder, and better? the same or do less than them? What can my solution, whatever it is, do to help you in that circumstance? So friends, I'm just here to say, and I'm willing to get beat up about it, I just don't like the question, what's your budget? Because if you're using it as a qualifying question on a sales call, you're qualifying just a little bit too late. All right, go down to the comments down below. Love to hear your thoughts on this. And if you've got negative feedback, I am happy to take it as well. Because I'm always willing to learn from everybody else. Never forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. We've gotta be figuring out what we can do to change and grow to take our sales games to places we only dreamed possible. Okay, let's talk next about your prospecting tip of the week. When I'm writing emails, friends, I'm always asking myself, the email that I'm writing, what value will the person that's receiving this email from me, What value will they get if they reply to me? If your emails to different prospects or clients are just generic and don't contain nuggets of value, why would they reply? Let me give you an example from my world. If I reach out to somebody and say, hey, I'd love to sit down and talk with you about your 2027 marketing plans. Well, in my mind, that's valuable because I'm looking to offer them a service. But in a world where they're busy, they've got a lot of plates to say grace over, and they're just slammed, that doesn't sound like a crazy productive meeting. It sounds like let's just get together and chat. So instead, what I want to do when I'm writing a value-rich email is say something like this: I'd love to meet with you to share with you some competitive information that will help you get better return on your investment from your marketing solutions in Q4 and as we roll into next year. Now there's value that they will receive from replying to that email to me or booking time to meet. Now some of you have reached out to me and you've said, Ryan, I'm providing value. I believe that these people should be seeing the value that's in it. Friends, if you're not getting replies to emails, you've got to be asking yourself 2 big things. One, Are they actually opening the email? So you can use tools like MailSuite, Mixmax, you can use Apollo AI. I mean, there's all kinds of tools out there to show when somebody opens it, or use your CRM. Your CRM should have some trackability in it as well. So the first thing, are they actually opening it? That could be a subject line thing. Okay, they're opening it. Okay, great. Then you have to ask yourself, does the email provide enough value that they would actually want to reply? When I look at your emails, not trying to be mean or throw any hate out there, throw any shade. Most of the time, the email value is for you, not for the customer. So just be asking yourself, when I'm prospecting, what value will they receive? What will they get if they reply back to me? Is this email more for me, or is the email really for all of them? All right, next up. Here comes your sales tech tip of the week. As a lot of you know, I'm a huge fan of AI. I believe that I've probably done more than most people to train ChatGPT and Perplexity in the sales business. But one of the tips that's often overlooked by a lot of my clients is loading samples of your emails into whatever LLM you are using. LLM standing for large language model. So like ChatGPT, is an LLM. Perplexity is an LLM. Copilot is an LLM. And let's not argue in the comments about, about the technicalities of that. I understand what I'm saying. And I'm trying to be a little bit— offer things in layman's terms. Okay. So here's what you might consider doing. Look into your sent mail, find 5, 6, 8, 10 emails that sound like you. That are in the format that you might potentially use, that have language the way that you write things. Take those samples and put them into, say, a Word file, for example. Now, you could copy and paste them into ChatGPT if you wanted to do that, but you might want to put it in a Word file because as your life changes, you might add more samples. Now, what you want to do is take those samples and say to ChatGPT, I'm loading samples for you. Of how I write my emails. Now, you do need to say this: setting grammar and spelling aside, this is my voice. This is how I sound. This is how I write. So I'm giving this to you so that you can help me as you're polishing up my emails or giving me email help. I can polish all that up, and it'll sound more like me. Now, you know one of my favorite prompts is forward slash human. You can use that. It'll make you sound a lot more— it'll make the bot sound more human. But friends, as a sales tech tip of the week, load samples of your emails into AI and tell it to remember this because you do want the bots to sound as much like you as possible. Now, if you load something up and it stinks, maybe it will tell you, but you could ask it, analyze this, tell me what I could potentially be doing better. All right, friends, let's move on to your retention idea of the week. As you know, I'm really, really big into retaining customers. I don't lose very many each year, and I think it's because I'm just a retention machine, and I will pat myself on the back for that. I love retaining customers. One of the retention ideas that I've seen many people do successfully is a bonus bucks program. So a bonus bucks program is something like this. Let me give you a Very kindergarten kind of example. For every dollar that you spend with us, okay, we're going to give you 25 cents towards future services with us. That's an example. Or for every $1,000 you spend with us, you get X amount of additional services from us. So the Bonus Bucks program allows somebody to be rewarded for how much time they have actually spent with you. So probably one of the most delightful retention ideas that I received from one of the companies that I use is in the 11th month, they reached out to me on a year-long contract. In the 11th month, they reached out to me and said, rather than send you an email about renewal, we want to send you an email of thanks. We want to thank you and we're giving you your 12th month for free. Well, they're geniuses. I mean, I was like, dang, really? That's awesome. I sure appreciate that. Well, then guess what they did after that? Then they started sending me renewal emails. Well, I feel good about them because of this retention strategy. They gave me a month for free before they asked for the renewal. Now, what I might have done following my own advice, what I might have done is said, thank you so much for your business. When you renew here in your 12th month, we'll give you a month next year. at no charge. So what I would be doing is encouraging the buy, then giving them something as a way to say thank you. You could potentially do it either way. But something that might be unexpected is to do like a thank you in the middle of the year. You could say, hey, we really appreciate your business. And we want you to have this month on us free. Or we want you to have a $500 credit on your bill absolutely free. I feel like sometimes When you do things that are unexpected, but are also somewhat personalized to that business situation, I think you really get further faster with people. I'd recommend a book that came out five six years ago. I believe it's called Giftology. I don't have it in front of me, or I'd show it to you. I think that there's a lot of lessons to be learned from that book Giftology. So if you got Amazon Prime, order it comes to your house for free. Take a couple hours and read it, or or go into ChatGPT. And ask it to summarize the book Giftology, and it'll do it for you and give you a very quick read. All right, my favorite time, uh, every week when we get together is your listener questions. And so keep those listener questions coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, next question, uh, comes from Lily out in California. Hey Lily, it's hot out there too, isn't it? All right, this is a media-related question, and that's fine. Happy to answer questions related to anything you're selling. All right, so Lily says, my advertisers all want guarantees. We don't offer a guarantee. What potentially do I say to someone that says, I will buy from you, but I want a guarantee? So Lily, first, you're not alone in the circumstance of advertisers out there, businesses wanting guarantees. Not at all. Here's the thing though that we all have to wrap our head around. Do we really offer guarantees? Do we? We don't. Most businesses don't offer guarantees. Now, there might be a guarantee that the pool won't leak, right, or that the air conditioner will cool, right? Warranty-type things, right? Guarantees, though, especially in the advertising business, are a business owner wants to spend, say, $500, and they want to guarantee that they're going to get that $500 back plus another $5,000. So, here's the way that I approach it. I usually kind of try to not make light, but be light about the situation. And I'll say, may I ask you a question? Are other companies guaranteeing you results of leads? If they say yes, ask for more detail. If they say no, they're not offering me a guarantee, then I respond back with, because we can only offer guarantees on things that we can actually control. Now, for example, I can tell you for sure that your ad's going to run in this particular magazine on that particular website, and that ad is on the website is going to be viewed 10,000 times, and the ad in the magazine is going to be sent to 30,000 people. I can only guarantee things that I can control because humans that might see your ad, it's very difficult for us to not only control what they do, but they typically don't remember what they did by the time they get to you. Now, another side note of that, Lily, is I offer kind of a fun way to talk about guarantees as well. One of the things I can guarantee— so, Mr. or Mrs. Customer, one of the things I can guarantee— that is, if you're not advertising with us, this particular customer is very excited about it. And so I might hold up a magazine that has another customer's picture in it or name in it or ad in it and say, I can offer you this guarantee: these folks right here are very thankful you're not advertising. I promise you that. And do something that's kind of light and fun, but it will get the point across. One final thing: if any marketing solution company offers you guarantees of leads, numbers of leads, you've got to be asking yourself, how good are these leads? Because guarantees are very difficult to live up to. So a lot of companies offer guarantees, and then what they do is they give you a lot of extra stuff that's not going to generate much to make you feel better about the purchase. So Lily from California, you're not alone in this. Hopefully some of those ideas will really help you kind of push the conversation a little bit more forward. Okay, great list of questions sent into ryan@ryandohrn.com. Let's move on to the Brainwork Tip of the Month. And as a lot of you know, I'm really big into psychology. I love psychology. And one of the things that I like to do as it relates to my brain is I do have to work hard to not be random. Some of us have talked about this in some of our coaching calls and at some of the bigger conferences where we've met at. And that is that a lot of times we accept being random as the new normal. And I really challenge you, whenever you hear someone say this is the new normal, I would challenge you to really push back a little bit and say, is it the new normal? Or have we just accepted the situation as it is? So what is randomness? And why shouldn't you be random? For the most part, when you randomly throw darts at a dartboard, you will hit the board. But you're only randomly going to hit a bullseye. Randomness is like waking up this morning and going, oh, I guess I should prospect a little bit today. You think? Yeah. And you should have a time block for it too. And you should use the Pomodoro Technique and you should have templates ready. See, randomness— don't confuse that with spontaneity. Spontaneity is, you know, I should take flowers home to my wife. Yes, you should, right? I should buy, you know, something special for my partner. Absolutely, you should. That's being spontaneous. Keep rocking on with your bad self. What I'm doing though is want to find things that are completely random, like randomly using subject lines rather than being deliberate with a subject line, randomly writing an email rather than being deliberate with social proof, a point of relevancy, asking for just 5 minutes. If you were to look at your day today or your day that just occurred, how much of it was random? How much of it was planned and deliberate? I find myself, because I'm more of a creative at heart, I find myself living in the land of randomness. And when I do, I need to create a path for me to dig back out of that. If you're an emotional person, tend to be a creative person, and you're in the sales business, quite honestly, because it makes you good money. I mean, honestly, I'm a creative. I would love to be playing drums and playing guitar and be in a band. But I just don't think it's going to keep my wife and myself in the lifestyle to which we've become accustomed. So what I want to do is do things that make my life easier. But what you'll find is, especially in the summertime, you just tend to be random because the weather's nice and all that different kind of stuff. So as a brainwork idea this week, friends, I really want you to stop being random and be a lot more deliberate in everything that you do. If you're random or ADD like me, you really need a schedule and you need a format to really help you get a long ways down the road in your sales game. All right, friends, you can learn more about what I do over at ryandohrn.com. D-O-H-R-N. You can also read the blogs over at salestrainingworld.com. Of course, some of you are watching on the YouTube channel. We sure appreciate that as well. Those in the ad sales business, you can head over to 360adsales.com. All those websites have videos and blogs and so much stuff to help all of you. But friends, what I really love As I love the invites to come to your office or come to your national sales meeting. We'll do a customized agenda. We'll get you pumped up to grow your sales 30% or more, friends, in the next few months. All right, I know that show was a little longer than normal. I think we had a lot of things to cover. And so I sure appreciate all of you so very much, and we'll see you on the next episode. Stick around, stay close. More great information on prospecting and selling coming up next. See you next week. friends.