Paul’s ability to demystify sales and turn it into an understandable, even fun process, has made him a firm favourite at Business of Software and the only speaker who has appeared in every edition of the event.
This time, he turns his attention to resistance. What do you do when a customer – or partner, or funder, or potential employee – says ‘no’? Why is it worth engaging with customers who are saying ‘no’ even when there are many more saying ‘yes’? And why has Paul distributed 450 balloons around the room?
A super, super talk for anyone who ever has to go out and pitch an idea or a product to anyone. Highly recommended
Video & Transcript below
Video
Whenever I hear Paul talk I hear two things:
- Some of the best, most straightforward advice on selling in the software business you’ll ever hear.
- The soothing tones of my native Yorkshire. He makes me homesick.
If you haven’t already, it’s worth checking out part 1 – The art of asking – and part 2 – Hardwiring sales into your organisation – of his trilogy from previous editions of BoS.
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Transcript
Okay, good evening just one more session to go. So, Iâm going to ask you guys just to stay with me as best you can and Iâm going to trying to tell something today, Iâm going to trying to do workshop stuff because I appreciate that the last hour of any day can be, it can be hard to concentrate especially when there being so many great speakers I had of this final session.
So, just stick with me now that youâll also notice the team, the business software team Iâm bringing some balloons right down. Can you just make sure that you get one balloon each please, itâs just for a point later on in the presentation but please make sure that you get one, youâve got one in front of you, and everybody in the room who is a delegate of the program needs to make sure that they get the balloon. Now, coming at the end of the table and theyâll be passed out. Okay, just to preamble let me start the form of it of my presentation.
So, quite a lot of hands went up yesterday. I couldnât really workout who were the new people and how many or what proportion of the room they were but a lot of hands went up. So, Iâm very aware that although Iâve been coming here for quite a long time we may not know me and I actually donât know you. So, my name is Paul Kenny. I am a salesman which means, by default, there is a degree of evilness and greed in my genetic makeup. I found that coming here for five years has helped me to deal with that in a sort of therapeutic way. I consider myself to be similar in the mission on the evilness and the greed, and stages but I canât tell you what a privilege is to come back here on year Iâm here.
Itâs exciting for all sorts of reasons but particularly because you come back and you meet people who had I mean coming by long enough now to meet people who had really small companies in 2008 and theyâve got really quite big companies now. Theyâre flying. And I see people whoâve taken the leap from coming as an employee who was a âwannapreneurâ- to use Patrickâs term- and theyâve taken the leap to become entrepreneurs. And itâs absolutely delightful to see that.
So, if you would indulge me slightly, what I would like to do is to just talk through some observations about the Business of Software as a means of introducing my presentation because when I first came here Iâll be honest, I wasnât really excited about the gig. Iâve worked with Red Gate for a quite number of years and Neil invited me and I say, âGreat. Who is going to be thereâ? âWell, itâs a bunch of software entrepreneursâ. That sounded great to me. And then when I started to look into what being a software entrepreneur really meant; it actually meant a bunch of developers and a bunch of engineers, and a bunch of product managers, and all the people who, if Iâm honest we had the odd running with over the years. The very first one, down at the Sea point 2008, was a little bit like walking into â it was like being a rabbit in the foxâs den- and I was pretty nervous when I came. But actually what I learn very quickly and in the subsequent Business of Software, it is actually, you guys, really get all of this sales stuff. I know this now. But you really get it, you really get it.
So, if youâre an entrepreneur then on – some level- that is synonymous with being a sales person. You get that it is not just about selling to a customer even if youâre a friction free SAS business. Youâre selling to your staff. Youâre selling to recruiters to send you the best people. Youâre selling to your stakeholders. Youâre selling for VC. Youâre out there trying to persuade people that your vision, your values are worth backing, in some way. And what Iâm try to show over the years is that sales skills can be developed even if you donât consider yourself to be a sales person and that they should be developed.
But when I sit down and reflect on this conference for the past few years, I think there were some themes that run through it. Every conference has its own sort of vibe. But running it over the four years- five conferences âthereâve been some themes developed.
And there is definitely a theme thatâs about smart marketing. And I guess Dharmesh -really you know- in 2009 in San Francisco, when inbound marketing came out and at that presentation, it was mind blowing. It was fantastic because it was really hugely practical and set stuff on standing out and being a purple cow. Itâs like, donât do marketing do really great marketing and apply loads of creativity to it.
And the stuff that Dan Norman did and some of Joelâs presentations and many others have been about- you know- being different. Yes, be useful to people and provide real utility but be different as well.
And then another thing that seems to hit every single conference that Iâve been at  since 2008 is donât just chase the cash build for sustainability as well as profit. And that was Jeffrey, the theme of Jeffrey Mooreâs presentation back in 2009 and Dharmesh is come back to it time-and-time again, and Scott from Atlassian went over a lot of this stuff as well.
The wining culture thing has just gone from the word âgoâ, and you know, thereâve been some fantastic presentations about culture in this conference. But you know, Tobiasâ presentation from the very end of day two this slot and last year I thought was amazing a very different sort of presentation, very reflective, very thoughtful, and really, really very good, And weâve talked about culture, Ryan a couple of years ago. Fantastic presentations about culture.
I still think that between Jason and Peldi, weâve kind of got this sense of balance. So there is a human side. Itâs not just all about working your backside off and stretching yourself. There is this kind of, youâve got to stay sane in the middle of this. âDonât worry be happy,â and all of that sort of stuff is really important and be honest to yourself be honest with your customers all of that. Donât be distracted from that, Clayton Chistensen equally.
And to be hugely customer obsessive understanding the utility that you deliver and making sure that it is something that customer is really want and really value and I think both of Kathyâs presentations – I mean San Francisco and here yesterday- have picked up on that, as have many, as Clayton Christensen particularly last year was like donât forget itâs the job that your product does. Itâs not about features and benefits.
Now, when I look at all of this Iâm kind of struck because I was really worried about this being tech conference in 2008. But when youâre looking at the continuing things and youâll have your own here what do you notice about them? So, itâs a rhetorical question, Iâm not expecting the answer donât worry. [Laughter]
Well, the thing that struck me was that actually this is all about attitude. This is all about the way you approach your business and Iâve seen nothing in the last two days that has changed my view of this. And in fact Iâm not even sure this is really the business of software conference is the business of âbuilding awesome products that create badass users that create customers that build sustainable businessâ conference. The only thing is you are going to need a really big T-Shirt to put that on. So, weâll stick with the business of software.
I wanted to point out that this is an attitude shift for a very simple reason. This last, this next session that Iâm going to do is where attitude is way more important than anymore, anymore particular skill. And I want you bear in minds that, you know, I can spend two days talking about this issue that weâre going to talk about and weâve got about an hour to do so. And so, Iâm going to focus more on the attitude then, but weâll talk some of the skills as well. For those of you who I donât know – because again I try to say âhelloâ to as many people as I can – but Iâve started really to describe myself as a sales coach.
This job, this standing upon stage is not my natural environment; Iâll be really honest with you. I do only few of these things every year. I consider myself to be a coach for sales and sales managers but thatâs a really hard thing to tell your kids what you do because all my friends have got proper jobs you know. I have a friend who is a pilot. I have a friend who is a doctor. I have a friend who is a car dealer. I have a friend who sells prosthetic vertebrae. Iâve got a friend who is, several of friends, who are teachers. And you know, theyâve all got proper jobs and their kids know what they do.
When people ask my kids what their dad does they just go, he just goes away a lot and so, you know, they think thatâs my job. So, what I try to do, I try to tell to them that being a sales coach is a bit like being a kind of 1960âs international man of mystery. You know, like [Laughter], a kind of like you know, I donât want to say MI6 sanctioned me arriving here but you know, Iâm here for Queen and country. And I try to make out that I can go at a momentâs notice tackle problems head on usually with a great city escape behind me and a good theme tune running.
But in fact the job of sales coach is really about sitting in dark corners with a set of head phones on or sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and going out with people and spending time while theyâre spending time with customers. And Cathy has a room named after the Hubspot thatâs just amazing, just fantastic. [Applause] Iâve a new ambition in life okay [Laughter] I want a small cupboard at Hubspot [Laughter] Iâm going to strive for that for the next, for however long it takes.
So, the job of a sales coach is to listen to a lot and lot and lot of sales calls. And sometimes a sales call is just- kind of- a two minutes thing where itâs more support than sales. And sometimes itâs to sit with people when theyâre doing major pitches, two hour presentations, diving into the detail of how youâre going to manage a project for the next five years or whatever. And what Iâve learned -and itâs obligatory to steal at least one slide from another presenter here – and it struck me during Cathyâs presentation- that actually what I do is a lot like sorting chickens. You know. Itâs like two chicks one conference, isnât that value for money? Yeah! So, when you listen to calls and the reason I mentioned is because if you get a take away from this, if you are the guy who is selling or the person who is selling for your business actually I want you to invest on whatever bit of software allows you to take your call and to capture it. And if youâre a managing sales people in your business I want you to start really, really listening very regularly to the interactions that you have with your customers. Donât put it off make it a positive thing.
If you want to talk to me about how you setup internal coaching and make it a positive experience, and not a fearful experience, Iâll happily talk about that but not in this presentation. And I want you to listen to lots some because just like the guys who sexes the chickens I hope nobody add this in a bad way. Just like the guy who sexes the chicken, when youâre listening to a sales call and when youâre watching a sales call after a while you develop a sense and itâs almost of sixth sense for how well itâs going. You get a sense of whether the customer is becoming more engaged with you or disengaging from the conversation. You get a sense of balance in there because you can feel it when itâs not going right and itâs just somebody pitching someone, and somebody not being that interested. It kind of feels like youâre in a wobbly boat. And so if you get good at this youâll be able to create a sales culture within your business that reflects all the other stuff that Mikey and Dharmesh have talked about. Because youâll be able to repeat, youâll be able to repeat this.
So, thatâs what I do for a living, just the phone coach not sexing chickens, and from all the calls Iâve listen too for years and years and years I think there is a few things that good sales people do really well. And that means people who have never saw before if you understand them can get to be good enough and sometimes thatâs fine and people who are pretty naturally talented at this stuff can become really, really excellent. And Iâve tried to make sure that every presentation Iâve done has tackled one of these things.
So, that very first presentation back in 2008 was all about âget your head around salesâ and âget you head around the fact that what the sales person does is create valueâ. Whether a CEO doing a program of selling your first bit of technology and somewhere, what they do is create value. And they do it by identifying what customers really value and then by finding articulating the value, solving the problem. Being awesome, and thatâs what they do. And it is just- I went on about it a bit in 2008 because I felt that itâs not very different from many other parts of the business.
Great sales people also -and this was couple of years ago in the presentation- are fantastic at working out what people value because theyâre very good in creating a dialog. And I mean, there is a difference between standard, crappy sales which is where everybody knows you got to question the client. And at a standard, crappy sale what happens is people ring you up, they ask you three questions all of which are designed to find something that they can sell you on. Iâm going to give you an example and this is not a reflection of Saleforces as a company Iâm going to give you one example. Iâve a client who I recommended to them that because of their systems were so ancient, their CRM system, they had three different systems feeding in it, that the sales directors were working without any kind of dashboard or any kind of data. And I recommended Salesforce. I said you know, you should at least start there. Even if you donât want Salesforce, you should start that because itâs a kind of the thing you should compare other things against. And I rang them and they agree to do a presentation. And there was this one guy and Iâve many conversations with Salesforce over the years and itâs not typical but there was this one guy and he stuck in my mind. And he was in Dublin with his colleague who was the technical expert and we had two sales directors, a managing director and myself in Scotland, listening to the call. And he asked the kind of questions that I call selfish questions, you know: âSo, how important is it for you to have a dashboard?â and we said, âOf course we want a dashboard for…â  âWell, the great thing about Salesforce…â. And every question was followed by âThe great thing about…â you know. And thatâs not actually creating a dialog. Thatâs trying to create opportunities to push stuff at a customer.  Itâs not authentic. What great sales people do – and I had equally good examples from  Salesforce, Iâm not having a down on them – is they try and build the dialog based around everything is going on so that we can uncover real problems that we might be able to find a solution to. And if we can, great, and if we canât, we learn something that we can then take on into Product Development or just client choice or whatever.
So, it was all about dialog, then we had Sharing Stories and thatâs about making the way that you articulate your sales, your sales by making it resonate with the customer, and having the right stories and there is a real art to selecting the right stories and then last year I took my closing and I dressed it up as the art of commitment because I was a bit worried about calling a closing in front of you lot but we took closing and we said if we donât ask – the purpose of a call if you remember me saying -the purpose of a business is to create customers if youâre not creating customers then youâre not really a business, youâre playing at it and one of the ways you create customers is you have a buy now button or you ask people if they want to, if they want to commit and all of those things when you listen to lots of calls and you spend time doing it you start to notice when people are doing them really well or when theyâre doing them not so well or theyâre not doing them.
The final thing that weâre going to talk about is managing resistance.
Now, Iâm going to try and explain what I mean by this using this random sci fi slide but resistance – how many people here demo as part of your job a great many of you Iâd imagine alright so, you know when you do those demos where before you do the demo you talk to everybody and theyâre like âYeah, weâre really keen to see a demo and so you go great and weâre really keen to demo for youâ and you go with that and then you start the demo and everyone is really nice and then there is key you get about halfway through and their language goes from âwell thatâs great, thatâs fantastic, thatâs wonderfulâ to âyeah, so, hmmâ.
And maybe you start to get a sense that something is happening here and when you say: âSo what you think?â âWell, not sure if weâve got the budget this year or I may have to take this to the exec levelâ or you get all of those sorts of thing and you just start to get the sense that everything is pulling away or youâve gone from being super keen to sort of wading through treacle to get anywhere. Youâve all had that experience at least once yeah?
Okay, okay itâs like therapy I told you. So that sense that you get is resistance and it happens for all sorts of reasons. Now itâs funny weâve all been doing superman poses for the last couple of days when I was in sales we used to, if we had a really bad day and we were having a drink we used to say what would be your sale super power? You know, if you could do anything? And I used to say I want, I want Iâd like a gun thatâs built into my hand like a zapper and every time somebody starts to lose interest or to raise a critical question or to tell me that theyâre not going to buy for me after Iâve demo the product or Iâve done a pitch or whatever? I said if I could zap people so the synapses fizz a little bit and they forget that they didnât really like something. Kind of like an Obi-Wan moment – very much you know,â these are not the droids you are looking forâ that kind of thing.
We canât do that in real life but if you stick with me for the rest of this presentation Iâll try and show you a few sales Jedi mind tricks, or at least from your own point of view, these might prove useful.
So, resistance is when customer start to say no, when they start to hold back and itâs frustrating, and itâs time consuming, and you donât, and itâs a bit depressing as well when youâve invested lots of stuff, lots of time in your product. It feels like a brick wall, thatâs hit you and you donât know where to go with it? And if you had that feeling where, it was so promising 10 minutes ago, or five days ago and suddenly nothing is happening and this could be when youâre pitching you know, somebody to come into business with you, and youâre working with VCâs, it could be working all sorts of situations and resistance kicks in.
So, we know what weâre talking about and what I want to show you is that you should think and worry about this stuff and your approach to it because it will define what type of business you are, at least in terms of your sales.
So, this is what we get to do balloon stuff, but the resistance effects people in lots of different ways do you any of you remember last year when Dharmesh asked that question he said âDo we need people to sell?â Does anybody remember that in Dharmeshâs presentation? I had this, when he asked this, I had this picture in my head of like 60 sales guys at Hubspot all sitting around the live stream with bated breath waiting to see [Laughter] what he was going to say? But thankfully he said âWell, yes of course we do, but we donât need them for everythingâ when we need sales people when we need sales people is when something is new, or when itâs complex, or when the price gets above a certain value, then actually the sales is less straightforward then people want support, and they want to talk to real people, and they want to ask questions, and they want to know the company, and they want their hand holding, and all of those sort of things.
So, you might be down here at the kind of friction free bit in your business, youâre like Amazon, or whatever and itâs just people will buy, or they wonât, or whatever? Or you might be more kind of service provider level where, the second two phases for a retail service provider, where, people just have kind of little problems that you got to deal with quickly in order to push through that. Or you might be right up at the other end on a big consulting projects or, you know, a big piece of enterprise software, where, if somebody says no thatâs a year of work down the toilet. So itâs different, it comes out in lots of different ways.
So, this is our workshop event. What I want you to do is to take your balloon, first of all, hold your balloon up so I can see youâve got it. No one is allowed to duck out of this exercise. If youâre truly balloon-o-phobic, because often one is in the group this size, then Iâll let you off but otherwise I want you to do this. Now what I want you to do is I want you to think of a client, I want you to think of a situation, where it can be a customer, client, a channel partner, a deal that you want to get done of some sort that has slowed down. It could be current, it could be in the past. You can even think outside of work life, you know, personal life or whatever if that helps but I want you to think of one and I want you to – this is where it gets all therapy stuff okay –  I want you to kind of take a deep breath focus on that person and I want you to get all the angst and all that sort of frustration that you feel out of here and into the balloon. Okay?
Kathy will tell you this is another way of raising testosterone and cortisol. I promise you. She wonât – Â she never said that, Iâm a salesman and [Laughter]. So, Iâm doing this for a very specific reason I want you to have a look why people saying no. So, I want you to create something you can look at.
So come on, think of a person, fill the balloon. It could be any deal this kind of frustration. I want you to pick it up, blow it up, and if itâs really frustrating blow it up, I mean really it blow up. You can do it <balloon bursts> Wow! We might need another balloon â and when youâve got it look around okay and when you got it I need to tie a knock in there please. Do you know what <another balloon bursts> wow, do you know what you guys look like? Okay, so, please keep all keep balloons safe right this is the workshop bit I want you to take your balloon, your person â fantastic – Â well, take your balloon and I want you to turn to somebody near you and I want you to introduce them to your problem. I want to say right this is Bill that weâve been talking to for a year the guy is a real pain weâve demoed him three times he is asked for eight proposals and weâre still no closer. So give him a name and I want you to tell somebody near you, you can do in twos or threes or whatever but I want you to tell somebody I want you to imagine this resistance. [Laughter]
Okay, okay it has to be quick Iâm afraid, it has to be quick itâs the end of the day. Your attention spans wonât last much longer. So, okay so now what weâve done is weâve taken this kind of weird sticky horrible feeling when things arenât happening and weâve made it real, we got something we can look at and address and talk about during the rest of the presentation. So, keep hold of your balloon treasure it, treasure your resistance okay.
So, I think itâs really important that we just talk about – very quickly – why you have to, as businesses, talk about what you do when the customer says no and how you respond. Because that reflects your culture, it reflects what you think about your customer, and there is a whole bunch of reasons why you need to have a response to this and you need to know what your response is and how youâre going to do this?
The first thing is there is just no such thing as a perfect product. Now, with a couple of comments I think Dharmesh yesterday said âYou know, rather than spending money on marketing, why donât we spend money on decrapifying the product” and that thatâs really good, really good advice, thatâs really good advice.
There is a slight worry because that sort of suggests that as long youâve decrapify the product the customer will get how youâve decrapify the product and will understand that, and they may not. It will certainly help and will make a big difference and again with Peldi today you know, âletâs make the software work”, yeah, before we start worrying about fancy marketing and again that sort of pre-supposes so so long as you have the perfect product people will come running to you.
Does anybody here have a 100% conversion on their downloads? âI wishâ yeah does anybody here have more than 50% conversion on the downloads? Wow, fantastic  – you can do next years slot.
You know, the difference is if they were perfect products, if they were perfect, and if I had time – I used to do this at sales conferences years ago, I used to give people 20 minutes to go and imagine, even in the world of imagination, go and make up the perfect product and people will come back with things like face cream for guys that if you rub it in makes you look like George Clooney and and it really works!
And even in the world of imagination you know, some of the guys were responding âI donât want to look like George Clooney I think Iâm already better looking than George Clooney you knowâ, [Laughter] I know and so there is no such thing. If there was such a thing as a perfect product you know, if there was such a things of prefect product they would have a 100% market share. Everybody would go and buy them and there would be no competition, weâd all be doing something different.
So, youâve to know how to respond to clients saying no because even if you build a fabulous product a big chunk of your clients will go no, not now, itâs not right for me appreciate everybody else is buying but not for me.
The other reason youâve got to do it and think about your response is, do you remember geography lessons when you learn about the path of least resistance and when the water comes of the mountains it finds the softest rock. Then you got these meandering rivers, itâs because the water is cut its way through the softest rock. Now, Iâve been training sales people for about 15 years okay. Who would like to hazard it to guess because this is very like, this very like a lot of sales cultures that I come across where people kind of chase the easiest deal. What kinds of companies are worst in dealing with resistance broadly, itâs not a rule, but broadly did you find?
You can shout if you answer. Speaker 2: [Inaudible] Paul Kenny: Well, actually no because it usually a bunch of guys who are absolutely terrified of loosing that I say they try and plan for everything. The thing is that usually the people whoâre awesome marketers are often very bad at dealing with nos and the reason is if you can generate 20,000 downloads across the year and youâve three people in a cupboard somewhere trying to sell to these guys and convert them. If the client goes no you go, âokay fine move on to the next oneâ and then you end up with this kind of meandering river style things.
Now, the only thing I mentioned is this that you can create huge islands almost of opportunity, missed opportunity that are there, and whatâs more, and Iâve done this as a consultant when somebody is number 2, number 3, number 4 in the market and they go âHow do we go ahead?â I often say go to all the people who have said no to the main player start with them.
Donât go to the people who love the main player and try and sell them, go to all the people who arenât using them, who have tried it. Then try to work out what they didnât like about it and then make that your point of difference. So, itâs really important that at youâre at least trying to talk to these people, closely tied into this is that often when we try and response to people when we decide itâs okay to be a little bit pushy (thatâs a small âpâ pushy) and to question it. Often you that find loads of this stuff can be fixed really quickly, like the client says âIâm not sure if fits with our current system.â Well, you know, when somebody says that to an engineer itâs like happy days isnât it? You know: âGreat! Tell us how to get into your system, lets have a look at the API, letâs get stuck in there.
Or people prefer another product we can often, we can often do side-by-side testing we can show them logically and clearly. So, a lot of the stuff: âOur boss says no.â okay letâs fix that letâs get your boss around the table letâs get to the demo, letâs sort it out. Youâll be surprised how many opportunities are missed from people who donât take this issue of resistance seriously. They just get wasted and just get frittered away.
So, donât tell me that youâve got awesome marketing and then we squander the effects of those markets because just itâs really not good enough. We really need to make sure that we can deal with those.
Does everybody remember Rory Sutherland from last year those whoâve seen it on the Livestream here? Portly posh Englishman [Laughter] has a bit of a problem with the French, you know, you remember him? Big on behavioral economics and he used this term lizard brain. I think heâs right and that when somebody comes up with something that is new and disruptive itâs our lizard brain not our logical brain that kicks in. So, I come along and say look at your stock management systems relying on four different systems two of which donât talk to each other and youâre running on the creaky mini computers 10 years old and itâs all going to fall apart and really you can put all this in the cloud and have one system that everybody can get at, and itâs a no brainer that you should do it, the first thing that I think is not wow thatâs going to change my life, the first thing is like âOh! God thatâs going to be busy, thatâs going to be hard work and this may be a crappy system but itâs my crappy system you know, Iâve been building it for years and I know every nook and cranny and nut and bolt to have a go at.
So, a lot of the stuff that weâve to deal with is perfectly natural, perfectly natural for people to want to say no before they get close to saying a yes. And one of the ways that manifests itself, another reason for a no, is that often people are saying no to you, not because they donât want to do business with you but because they want to test your faith and your stamina.
The hardest presentation I ever did – I can still remember this guy. This guy is called Joe Putnam he worked at a company called London Transport Advertising. So, if youâve ever been in London you look across the Tube and thereâs big posters on that and posters on the buses. And they used to, long ago, I think Clear Channel or someone does it now, but years ago they used to do the advertising. And Joe was 60 years old and I was 26 years old setting up my first media training organisation and they were our one chance of getting a big deal, a big stable contract. And he sat me down in his very grand office, across a big wooden, big sort of, mahogany desk and he just went threw one reason after another:Â that you guys are too young, you donât know our market well enough and you donât know the data behind it and I donât know anybody who see you train and he went through all of these, over and over and over again. And I was there about two hours and I even had a little break and I even sent my partner in to take over we were tag selling. Years later Joe told me he said: âI knew I was going to book, you know, I was going to hire you guys because Iâve been told that youâre good guysâ and he said âI knew you could do it because Iâd heard feedback from other people. Â But I just wanted to see if I could work with you.â
And your clients will do this to you a lot theyâll go no and theyâll throw the problems up not because they think your software is suspect but they might think your organisation is a bit suspect and what they want to see is, now if you back down, if they say hereâs these problems and thatâs why weâre not going to use you and you go âokay, plenty more fish in the seaâ. See what have you just done? Youâve validated these thoughts about you. If youâre a genuine pioneer, a genuine evangelist that is your opportunity to show it. Clients often times just have nag, a nagging doubt but they canât articulate it. And when youâve a nagging doubt about something which you cannot articulate you get this I donât know what the word is that I guess itâs dissonance or something where you kind of torn two ways. But because you canât articulate your problem your most likely default solution is âweâll leave it this time, thanks.â Or theyâll make up an excuse not to do it. By having a response and pushing back and challenging your customers you actually get a chance to help them articulate that problem. And when they articulate it you can do something about it.
This is a slide from last year when â if anyone was awake at this time last year. Here we say when you talking to a client or to the guys who raise objections, who raise problems theyâre the customers who you will learn the most about, theyâre actually the customers youâve got the best chance of turning into bad ass users because theyâre the ones who are questioning the whole time and that the ones who are feeding back. The guys who just love you and buy –  well theyâre kind of trying to turn themselves into bad ass users. These are the people where you can get a chance to make a genuine difference to the business.
The other, the last two reasons that you should think about pushing back on clients and challenging clients and not thinking that theyâre always right. Does anyone recognize the film? Force Ten from Navarone,  well done! Itâs not a great film but itâs a story of how Indiana Jones and the Apollo Creed won the war okay [Laughter] and well something like that but the two kind of heroes were this stiff upper lipped British major, played by Robert Shaw, and Harrison Ford who is a kind of you know, the tough guy American marine and theyâve got to blow up a dam. And the story goes that they end up in the middle of the dam, they go down into the middle of the dam and they got all the charges and all sorts of dreadful things have been happening for them to get there. And they realize when they get in the middle of the dam that they havenât got enough fuse to give enough time to get out. Because the Edward Fox at the front there, who was the ammunition expert, he send them in without enough fuse.
So they decided,rather bravely, that they were going to give their lives to blowing up the dam. So, they lit the thing and they walked off together these two guys itâs a touching moment. And there is an explosion and then as the dust clears the dam hasnât blown up and these two guys are barely hurt. So, they get up and they run for it and they get out to Edward Fox and theyâre like âYou stupidâ and Harrison Ford doing this stupid limey thing you know, and Edward Fox is your total sort of, Cambridge geek actually. He says âoh just wait, I didnât mean to blow the whole thing up, Â I just meant to let the water inâ and as he is saying it – I hope this isnât a spoiler for you guys [Laughter] as he is saying it the water get into the cracks and the cracks break and everything goes.
Now, I think itâs the same with a client. When the client says no even if theyâre saying no Iâm not going to do business with you and thatâs the end of the conversation, if you stood up to them I mean if youâve questioned the reasoning, if you got to the heart of it, if you had a real dialog about it, sometimes you just put a little doubt in their mind and it wheedles away. And often they preferred supplier you know, if you got 10 clients who you lose two will have preferred suppliers who are going to screw up. If you put enough cracks in their doubt you often find that the simplest sales just come right back to you they bounce right back to you.
The final reason you should take this stuff seriously is that a sales conversation with no resistance usually ends up in no sales. Itâs old, old cliche. If somebody doesnât bother to raise doubts it usually means theyâre not interested theyâre being polite and youâve all being in those demos where they go: Â âumm-hmm, yeah, great, fine, alright, okay, yeah click out, yeah fine, oh database, oh cloud, yeah, great!â And you go right the way through and you just know, and you just know, donât you, and then they look at each other and go âwell, itâs not really my job to buy software for this company you knowâ [Laughter].
And you just know â in my old advertising days we used to say if itâs too easy theyâre not going to pay. You know, they had no intention of paying.
But we have to, not just challenge the guy weâve to think very carefully about how we challenge the client because theyâre saying no theyâre in the process of disengaging from you and ego comes into play.
Now, I thought that Adii did a great presentation – where is Adii? Is he still here? Okay, donât matter. I thought he did a great presentation but Iâm going to take him to task when I see him. That very heartfelt compliment he gave his wife was absolutely touching, is absolutely lovely, but it now means that I can never let my wife see that presentation. Because the moment she does, she is going to go back through the, back through the other videos that Iâve done, and Iâve done four of them and sheâs going to be âI donât remember you telling everybody at Business of Software how lovely I was!â and itâs going to be a awkward conversation. Weâve been together 26 years and what weâve learned is that this whole load of stuff but you really shouldnât do together. Ikea furniture is one, cooking is another you know, there are things that you just shouldnât, you shouldnât do because once we do it you get into: âwell you should have put the bolts in firstâ and then even though you know you should have out the bolts in first, are you going to pull the bolts in first? There is no way – Â youâre going to build it in,you know, an entirely awkward way, because the ego, the lizard brain has kicked in.
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So, you must push back on customers but you canât do it in a pushy way because then youâll lose customers, this is an old cliche if you win the argument youâll lose the sale. So, letâs have quick look at how and why customers say no? It comes out in three ways, it comes out as objections which are the reason Iâm not going to buy from you, it comes out as sticker shock or price query how much? And it comes out as â ooh â the one I hate. âLeave it with me, Iâll think about itâ, and thatâs awful.
There are two types of objection that you get, you get very logical objections if youâre selling to Jason Cohen and you go in with a you know, a new piece of software thatâs going to sort something out for WP Engine. You can pretty much be sure that he will have done his homework, and he will go âIâm a bit concerned about the followingâ and heâll have a list. I donât know Jason that well, but Iâm kind of you know, stereotyping, sorry Jason, and those objections will be down to a lack of information, there will be down to a deficit of information, or a misunderstanding that exists, that requires clearing up.
And then you get those things are emotional. I just hate the UX you know, I hate the color you should have gone two shades lighter on your blue, damn you. So, if youâre selling a new shirt to Mark Littlewood and he says you know, âCome on stripey and muted color shirts are really not meâ you know, itâs an emotion thing, there is no logical reason for that, itâs an emotional objection. The sticker shock thing weâll talk about later, it always comes up.
And then thereâs the delayed reaction and this is a really nasty one because how many of you have that thing where the guy says âI want to think about itâ and you never speak to him again? You canât get hold of him. Now, everybody who says I want to think about it you must challenge to find out what theyâre thinking about. Iâll tell you about that in a moment.
So, there are three responses, in fact, that generally should  be happening you should, if youâre sending sales people out you should listen for these and if youâre doing the sales you should be wary. Thereâs two traditional responses and thereâs an effective response to dealing with any kind of resistance.
The first traditional response is to attack. You know, somebody says I pretty much think your UX is poor âWe spent seven years building a UX and weâve got three designers each of whom have worked for Apple, Facebookâ and you kind of go on the attack, and itâs predicated on the assumption, or the belief that the client is an idiot. Or, at best, misinformed. Or thatâs the way it comes it comes across.
Do you know who some of the worst peoples for this are? [Laughter] Engineers, Founders, Builders, Experts. Because I know everything and Iâm frustrated that you didnât get it first time around. Yeah? But the problem is when you go on the attack, weâre back to Kate and I trying to build an Ikea wardrobe. Itâs never going to end, itâs never going to end happily.
So, the other problem, and this is a real problem Iâve found in some of the software companies I work with, is where actually they go: âthey donât want it? Fair enough.â  And thatâs it. So the clients say: âyou know what guys I donât think this is the right thing for me.â And they go âfair enoughâ. White flag. And it usually comes from companies who say âWeâre not a pushy sales organization, we donât want to be pushy. Weâre quite happy to let our customers down, let them carry on with crappy software from another supplierâ you know, but âwe donât want to be pushy, we want to be pure and pureâ. Okay [Laughter] And neither those is particularly great.
What the top sales people that Iâve worked with over the years do, is they treat it all as a huge game and what they are is explorers. They understand that the resistance that is coming up is a natural  and necessary part of the sales process, of the deal process. No real deal will be done unless there are some points of friction that are in there. And what they do is they seek to explore it.
When we were mapping this for a client, we were trying to build some competencies for a client we found out some stuff that you can do. Itâs not a great slide, I apologize. But there is some stuff that you can do which is really easy to do. You can train sales technique and you can train sales awareness and teach them about customers. You can train some stuff about the market knowledge you can create wikis for them and you can and should and probably do lots of product training for your sales guys. And thatâs actually all easy – itâs a no brainer and you should be doing it because they wonât be able to push back against the resistance unless you got these things.
What is much harder to develop is the stuff you should be recruiting for. So, you know, Mike said this morning, he said âWe get somebody in, we get them to bring in some leads and we go: âSo, I want to see if you can actually have the stones to pickup the phone and call customer because if you canât do that – congratulations Jody by the way and your presentation on overcoming your fear of sales – but if you canât do that then you got an issue. And I would say thatâs great, and push it further because actually what you should do, as you should stick some resistance into the sale. You should tell people why youâre thinking of not hiring them. And you just see how they deal with it? And you should give them all your product data, weeks before, and you should get them doing sales to people, not the recruiters, to people they donât know, and you should be pushing back on them the whole time.
They donât necessarily have to be superb, their answers. What they have to have is the attitude where theyâre thinking on the feet the whole time. Theyâre looking for the best way to articulate the benefits. Theyâre very good at you know, do you know about people âstaying on sideâ this is the argument thing? There are some people who just always end up in an argument you know, they attack folk. There is an art to staying on side with a customer, there is an art to… instead of it being somebody going âI really hate the UXâ and they chuck it and the person catches it and they actually go: âyeah, well itâs been really well designed and the other clients like itâ and they chuck it back. And they go âWell, I donât, and I donât think my clients will like itâ and they check it back.
And you end with this kind of sales volleyball that goes on. And the guy with the money is always going to win that game, he is always going to win that game you never ever going to be, you never going to beat it. But if someone can actually go: âwow thatâs really interesting, thatâs really interesting and what is it that makes you feel that way?â and to start to naturally explore it. If someoneâs instincts are to do that. IE to take their ego out of it and look at it objectively and workout a game plan for it then you know you got somebody who is probably going to do a great sales job for you.
Theyâre also naturally persistant. Â Iâm going to tell you just a story of a guy I was recruiting. A sales guy for the client and this guy came along and he was just too young for the job. And he didnât have enough experience although we really liked him but we only had one position and we gave it to a more experienced person. And this guy met me next day and he said âIâm really disappointed that I didnât get that, can you tell me whyâ and I respond the main thing really was we needed somebody with more experience. âHow much more experience would I have needed in order to you know, in order to have got the job?â And I say well, Iâm not really sure but you know, this guy been in the market you know, 10 years. âYeah but heâs been in the market for 10 years, are you saying I need 10 years experience because if thatâs the case and I need to go and workout how I go and get that? Or do I need two or three years,did the guy who got the job did he have two or three years experience, two or three times over?â And that got me really thinking – my god he is right actually you know, the job is not so complicated that you need 10 years to be able to do it. And he just kind of left me thinking, you know, heâd set the bomb off, in my mind.
Three months later the guy we hired he was all experienced, he did that thing that I hate? Got a better job! Got up, walked out. And he announced it on his LinkedIn. This guy has been smart enough to LinkedIn with the guy who got the job as soon as he saw the announcement I got a call. âAre you still looking for experience, will three more months experience do?â [Laughter] [Applause]Â Every time I tell that story people sidle up to me and go âSo, what was his name?â [Laughter] Not telling, not telling okay.
So, what they do, the general principles are we donât attack problems, we understand problems, we ask questions, everything I said in that dialog presentation we go back to.
And the one question we never ask is why?
Why do we never ask âWhyâ? Well, the word âWhyâ that itâs called and if you talk to an English teacher itâs called the simple interrogative. âNo, we think weâre going to use someone elseâ âWHY?â It puts people on their back foot. âWhat made you make that decision? What factors did you consider? How did you arrive with that? Who else did you consider?âThese are things that people will happily answer for you. Get on side weâve talked about.
Respond and reframe.
Do you know what I mean by reframe? Have you come across this term. You can either solve it, if itâs a logical objection you can handle it by data, you can say look you know, Jason youâre right but here is some more data for you to mull over and I can show why weâre better and weâll get you better response so whatever? But reframing is changing the problem.
Letâs give you one other example that stuck in my mind for nearly 20 years. I went out with a guy on a sales trip, he was from a local newspaper and he was selling advertising and I have to go and watch. And he went to see a travel agency and heâd sold them a half page advert and he went in and this half page advert was a couple of thousand pounds. And we went in there and the guy said âIâm not advertising with you ever again.â Okay, thatâs the one of the tough situations – when people have tried your products and then said no, thatâs a really tough one to deal with. And he said âWhy?â Well you know, he probably didnât say âwhy?â he said âWhat concerns do you haveâ  or something but I canât remember. Anyway he probed into it and the guy said âWell, I only sold three holidaysâ â they were selling city breaks â âI make about 200 commission out of each one, itâs just not worth it. And this guy explored away and he asked âWhoâre your customers?â And he dug and he dug and he dug, and what it turned out was that this guy sold specialist holidays, weekend breaks, couples and empty nesters, if you know what I mean by that. And he prided himself on being a really great company and the people that would go on three or four holidays a year with him because they loved him so much and theyâll stick around for 10 years and this guy got him talking about it and he said âI know youâre disappointed I really I know youâre disappointed he get him inside Iâm as disappointed as you are, weâll try and work on that, but donât think of it like you just got three salesâ he said âWhat you did, what you won, was you just got three customers. You converted three customers and if those customers are going three holidays a year or three vacation weekend vacations a year and you can keep them for five years, does the ad pay for itself?â
And off course what heâd done is he reframed the reference. So, look for people who can do that sort of stuff because I tell you itâs quite rare amongst most sales people. So, when you hear that all this stuff, when youâre doing youâre listening – focus on it. Hire it. And stick it in the middle of your sales flow because then it starts to spread.
Closing. Closing weâve talked about last time. I havenât got the time to go into it.
So, logical and emotional weâve talked about a little bit. Price objections, this is a good time for me to mention that the second edition of Neil Davidsonâs book âDonât just roll the diceâ is available today. And when Neil did his presentation in San Francisco in 2009 there were lots of kittens I remember in there. Itâs like how many kittens is an iPod worth and of those sorts of things. Which reminds us that every price objection that youâll come across is an objection of relative value.
Or itâs a smoke screen. You donât want to do something then your friends try to persuade you to go to the match or go out and you really donât want to do it because theyâre a bit boring and you know, you donât want to be associated with them anymore then you know. What you donât want to tell them is, you know, youâre boring and you smell a bit and I donât want to be seen with you. What you actually saying to them is âI havenât got the money you know, right I canât afford it right now, Iâve got other things to spend the money onâ, itâs an easy excuse to make.
So, really what can we do? Well the first thing we can do whenever somebody says âLook this is too expensiveâ, is to largely ignore it. Okay letâs look the way youâre getting for the money before we decided itâs too expensive and dig in: âwhat do you want? What did you expect to get for the money?â
The other side of it is that you can always ask this question, and this is one of those Jedi questions, âin comparison to what? At $200 a month for our software?â âwell, Iâm spending nothing!â âbut in comparison to how you would value your time? Every time youâve to fix that Excel spreadsheet that really isnât holding together your entire CRMâ And then when you start to think about it like that itâs a different matter. So, those four little words â âin comparison to whatâ are really, really valuable
And this final thing âI really want to think about itâ. Thiss is really kind of an issue because the moment somebody says âIâm thinkingâ itâs really hard to then go back to it because if you go back to them youâve been pushy and you get those testy responses I said I would think about it and Iâll let you know when I thought about it [Laughter] and youâve been in situation, itâs awful, nobody likes it not even the hardened sales people like doing that to people.
So, when people say Iâve got to think about it, to stop them disappearing off the sales radar, what you need to work out is, do they really mean it? And theyâve got something to think about or actually itâs not, and thatâs the end of the sale call and itâs done and there is nothing we can do and we can move on to other leads. So, you wonât waste your time or theirs. And if you donât deal with it what you get is that this is the graph is that you know, as youâre talking to somebody the desire as you explain the benefits and you tell your story it should be going up and then they go to think about it and then the left youâre leave them to think about it and theyâre go into what I call the dip of doubt well, they sit there and they go âOh! Itâs quite expensiveâ and there is no one that to say âin comparison to what?â And they go âIâm not sure whether they work with our APIâ, and there is no one that say âWell, letâs have a look at the specificationâ and when you say I want to think about it that itâs almost always goes down after thinking.
But if you get somebody to tell you what theyâre going to think about? âOkay, how will you judge the criteria? What are the decision criteria?â If you can get them to articulate them, even if you canât sell it at that particular time. Â What you can do then is you can send them an email today ââ I just thought you might want to see this schema that weâve doneâ or âhere is a reference from another client that might help you understand who is using itâ or âhere is the great presentation from Sequel and the City that is done by one of the guys who is using this productâ and you can give them stuff that help some get over to dip of doubt, you can maintain it. If you let it go you bottled it as we say in Yorkshire.
So, I had to whizz through this because but what I want you to do is take two or three key things first of all I want you talk to whoever selling in your company  and I want you have a serious conversation about what our response is? And I want you to have a serious conversation about how far itâs okay to challenge the clients? And you need to challenge them just as far as the challenge is serving them – does that make sense? Yeah, itâs making them think differently and I want you to know what that is, itâs a conversation that you should have because I canât tell you what that point is, itâs the different for everyone of your companies and I want you to build into your sales culture and then say well how do we build into our sales culture, a positive challenge to customers.
So, when you see the resistance when youâre looking at your balloon you go hey Bill you know, actually Iâm talking your balloon is probably not a good idea for staff moral but if you holding it and have a look at look at it, youâve got an idea that actually you gain nothing by putting the while flag up or going to war on some point of ego because you build the software. You gain nothing, you only gain something from asking really cool, really interesting questions. And the other thing I took away from Cathyâs talk yesterday was that, if you record calls, if you listen to people and if you every few days, every time you got the chances to sit down, you play it back and back and you got that immediate feedback loop and you go what would we do slightly different next time and letâs do again and again and again. We get into that learning loop that Cathy talks about and itâs still the most effective way to switch a sales habit that Iâve ever come across, so itâs nice to see validation from another source.
So, what weâre going to do is weâre going to end the presentation by tackling; weâre going to tackle our resistance head on. So, this the last time, can I ask everybody to stand up and hold that resistance up here. Okay, I want you to look at this – these are all of the reasons why people are going to say no to you? And I want you to know that in the face of a committed, a passionate, a sales savvy entrepreneur, all that resistance is entirely futile. So, what weâre going to do is weâre going to get rid it together I would like to put you on the seat behind you please and just want you to squat down so youâre resting very gently on it okay very gently altogether please, altogether everybody okay and after three weâre going to squash the resistance okay, one, two, three [balloons burst everywhere][Applause],
Weâre done. Thank you.
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