Paul Kenny: Developing your Sales Story

Paul Kenny spends most of his time trying to persuade sales people to be more entrepreneurial. But most people in the business of software have the opposite problem. We’re entrepreneurial, but we need to more salesy.

In this video from BoS USA 2009, Paul talks about sales stories and about how we, as entrepreneurs, can use them to bridge the gap between our technical insights and our customers’ commercial needs.

Brilliant.

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Transcript

Paul Kenny 

Hello. I think I am sitting right at the back yesterday when Dharmesh asked how many people were in Boston, but I still think it was about two thirds of the two thirds of the room. So even though I can’t see you, Hello, it’s nice to see you. Again. I can’t tell you as a salesman, how sort of pathetically grateful you are to be invited anywhere. So you don’t you know, when you don’t have to kick the door down to get in somewhere. And to be asked back is, is amazing. So I am delighted to be back. For those of you who I haven’t met before. I spend most of my career working with companies in company, I don’t do this sort of stuff. Very often, two, three times a year, I come into conferences, most of my job is working with companies in company looking at their sales teams. And when Neil invited me last year to come and talk here, I was somewhat nervous, and a little bit skeptical about whether this was going to be the right thing for your conference, if I’m honest. And the reason for that was that I spend most of my time trying to get salespeople who have chosen sales as their career to be a bit more entrepreneurial in their approach to the to the customer, to care more, to be more creative, to take responsibility for the message and the delivery of the service, and not just focus on the deal in the commission, et cetera. And when really, I guess what Neil was asking me to do was come and talk to entrepreneurs and say, be a bit more salesy about what you do. So here I am a year on for those of you who weren’t here, last time, really, it took me a whole hour to say –

Love your inner salesperson.

And that was pretty much the that was pretty much the the nub of the whole thing. What I’d like to do this time is to talk about stories. And I do apologize, right from the start for putting in the bit of lazy stereotyping. And having a Star Wars figure right in the middle of my, my slide there. I wasn’t going to do it is lazy stereotyping. But once I slipped on my blue snuggie robe last night, was I was I the only one who had an OB one moment? Yeah. Clearly not. Came over all i like Guinness in front of the mirror last night. And, and so I had to put I had to put him right in the center of the incentive stage.

We are we’re going to talk about stories, which is only one bit of selling. But I think it’s I think it’s critical. But let me just step back to last year, because one of the things that came out last year, I looked at the feedback, I listened to the feedback that people gave me on the day and I looked at the feedback that you all sent through. And you know, there was a mixed reviews as you would expect. And in a room with 350 odd people. Some people thought the sales talk was great, and it inspired them to go out and do more selling. And that was I was absolutely thrilled by that. At the other end of the spectrum. One guy said in the feedback, you know, after listening to this guy for an hour, I’ve still never met a salesman I can trust. So if you’re here, sir, sorry, I’m back again. And, and but interestingly, there was some of the comments in the middle. Some people came up and said, Paul, wouldn’t it be great? How do you fancy coming and selling for us come and work for us? And I thought, well, actually, as flattering as that is, you guys have missed the point slightly, because I would probably do a terrible job of selling for you even though I’ve got 20 year sales experience in sales, because I don’t have the knowledge, the passion, the kind of interest in the market and your specific market that you do. And it’s a lot easier for you guys to learn the sales stuff and it is for me to learn your your your market, at least in the least in the in the short term. What also worried me was actually not so much the feedback from the group, but with some of the speakers. If I’m honest. Somebody moaned in their presentation. This is where I do it Dharmesh. This is where I do the polarizing bit. Somebody moaned in their presentation about you know, God, those salespeople, they go out there and you know what, they come back to us and they ask us to do stuff that the client has said will be useful, you know, can you believe the cheek of it? One of the speakers I told a joke. He said to guys to software guy or two guys from software company going to a sales meeting. There’s a there’s a product manager, and there’s a salesman one’s there to know what he told me he’s talking about the other one’s there to drive the car. Yeah, I laugh I almost did. And if you watch that video again, from last year, you’ll hear a thudding in the background. That’s my head against the desk as you go, because that tells me that you’ve completely missed the point about integrating sales into what you into what you what you do. That tells me that in your company, those sorts of stories are true, then your salespeople, and your product managers, and your software developers, all may inhabit the same space, the same mountain rage, but they are looking at each other from twin, but very separate peaks, you know, across a huge chasm of misunderstanding. And that is no way to set up your sales.

So what we’re going to try and do is just focus on one simple message at a time.

And the first of them is this, forget thinking about the product and the sales, okay? If you don’t have a sales department, guys, you still have a sales function. So many people believe that, you know, if I have a couple of guys who are selling, then I don’t have to worry about that I can push that over to the side. And then if they don’t hit their target, if they don’t make their commission if you know, then it’s not my fault. It’s not my issue. And I don’t have to worry about that too much.

Some of the people say, Well, you know, we don’t have a sales department where we’re programmers, we’re product managers, we’re marketeers. Every company has a sales function. Because you talk to your customers via Twitter via email via phone, you meet them at conferences, you go out and see that you’ve got a sales function, whether you like it or not. So the only question that really matters is, is our sales function, as good as a marketing function, our programming function, product management function, our finance function, all the other stuff that you that you do? And if it’s not, there’s a big question there, which is, why not?

So we’re going to talk about stories. And the reason we’re going to talk about stories, is because I think that in order to bridge that gap between the kind of sales department and the rest of the company to talk about the sales function, as one is to just pick up on I think it was Heidi Rosen yesterday, who, when she was saying, you know, what makes a great founder doesn’t always make a great CEO. And she said it a couple of times. And in both cases, she rattled off the characteristics of great founders and great, great CEOs, and she puts sales in the CEO category, if you recall. And that that kind of thought. So that’s interesting, because that’s clearly how an outsider, you know, a VC looks at it.

But I look at it a little, I look at it a little bit differently. I look at it as being a challenge to get the sales entrepreneur to find the sales entrepreneur, within you and within your organization to discover the sales entrepreneurs.

Now the truth is, if you are recruiting sales people, people you know, who have, you know, decided at college level that they want to go into sales, or that’s a good career. In some ways, that’s relatively easy, because as I said, last year, you can profile for attitude, and you can teach the skills. And really the only hard thing is finding people who wants to be in sales. When you train and develop the sales entrepreneur, you’ve got a slightly different story, because they didn’t come into business to do sales, they came into business to do to create great products, fantastic products, and the sales thing has become forced upon us. And many of the people who are in this room, many of people will put their hands up many of you have already said that it’s just not my thing. I’m not outgoing. I’m not. I don’t easily connect with people. It’s not my it’s not my thing. But I think the sales entrepreneur has some real advantages. Some huge advantages.

Advantage #1: The sales entrepreneur has unparalleled knowledge of the product and the technology that they’re selling.

Nobody else knows it. Like nobody can dive into the code and into the product and into the to the usability of the product quite like the sales entrepreneur, no salesperson I’ve ever met, who’s who’s sort of third generation and for company has ever been able to do that as well.

They’ve also got here huge market customer insight. Because in many cases, and many of the people I spoke to yesterday, many of them were the customer, they were sitting in that office frustrated about something, and you know, decided to create a product to solve the problem they had. So they were the customer, they’ve got a huge amount of customer insight. And they really great strength is they are very, very sensitive to feedback.

Would anybody like to hazard a guess for me what their three biggest weaknesses are? So this is, I can’t help but throw questions out, and I can’t really see you. But so somebody shout, what do you reckon the biggest the biggest weaknesses are? I’m sorry. They’re exactly the same three.

Yeah, the problem that we have with these is that the unparalleled knowledge of the products and technology means that they can bore for their country, on the topic of their of their product, they can tell the customer, absolutely everything that they that they know about the product, whether it’s particularly relevant or not. The problem with a customer insight is they sort of expect the customer to get it like they get it. So they sort of expect the customer to realize the problem. But they realized when they founded the company, and they sort of expect the the feedback that they get, they become hyper sensitive to it. They bristle when somebody has the temerity to say to them, it’s not right. It’s not what I want.

So I’m going to argue today for a shift in in an attitude to sales over overall, a shift in thinking from a sales as a job, which is you know, somebody that comes to the job description and the guy who sits there in his suit in a cube, you know, doing that doing the sales thing, to a role, something which we can all embrace in what we do. And particularly those of you who don’t have a sales department is the easy bit of your role to ignore. There’s always something else that we can that we can be doing, to shift from show and tell. Kind of selling this is what we this is what we do. This is business, fantastic. Look at the features, look at the apps and all that sort of stuff to engage and share. Because that’s what really good salespeople those were really good sales entrepreneurs do. They engage the customer in their story, they share their stories with the customer. They’re interested in the customer’s story. And I’ll explain more about that. As we go.

The shift from sales focus to customer focus, Jeffrey Moore said yesterday, right at the start of a sales process in their organization. We don’t allow PowerPoint, we don’t allow presentations, we say go in there, tie your hands behind your back and ask questions. And I completely agree, although I think he could have pushed it a little bit further. Because some people ring up and they ask questions because they’ve read in a sales book somewhere that they should ask questions. But they ask questions, which are all about them.

What do you currently do to replace your CRM software system? That’s another question about you. Yeah, that’s a question about the opportunity for me. They don’t talk about your business, your marketing challenges, the difficulty of identifying your your your customers, that’s the difference between a sales focus and a customer focus and the way we go and also to see a shift from sales as the final bet. So we go out there research and market, develop a product, test it, take it out to the market, and then we start doing that we start doing the selling bit to something that we do right from the word go. And a stories based approach to selling is the way to do that.

So I guess we all know who this guy is right? Okay, do we have any cycling fans in the in the in the room? We got to we got one or two we got one or two fans? This guy is absolutely amazing. If you look at his record, he’s Paul Maris. You will see that he was US Junior triathlon champion. He was US amateur road race road racing champion. He was the US national road racing champion. He was the world road racing champion. He has I think 22 stages of the Tour de France. On his record, he has seven wins along with a host of weekly classics. Now that is his data. That’s his record.

But that is not why Lance Armstrong sold 50 million yellow wristbands. The reason he did that was because of his story.

There have been successful American cyclists before, who never grasped the imagination of the company of the country, rather. There have been many more many successful cyclists, many of whom, at the time had already had more Tour de France’s than he did. It wasn’t his record that made the difference. It was his story. And his story is incredibly compelling. It’s a story of redemption. It’s a story of an overly confident, somewhat cocky young man who hit a hit a crisis and found a way out of it. It’s a story of friendship, he spends a lot of time talking in his book about the sponsors who stuck with him through his illness, and the ones who didn’t, and he’s not afraid of mentioning, mentioning them. He, it’s a story of family. It’s a story of love. It’s a story of great courage, it’s a story of sporting grace, it’s all of those things. And it’s the story, that excited people and made them buy into his, his cancer, charity, and all the other things that that he did.

Now, your story is no less important in your world. And I want you to think about why stories work. Okay.

Stories worked for a number of reasons:

#1 Stories work because they allow you to get a lot of information across in a really straightforward format, and sometimes very complex, very subtle information.

And I’ll show you how we do that as part of our consulting process in just in just a moment.

#2 Stories are visceral, they’re visual, once you tell a great story, people see themselves inside the inside the film as it were.

And if people see themselves inside the film, they start to believe they start to listen to story allows you to get under people’s radar, especially if your customers are very logical people. Data doesn’t often move very logical people because it just gives them more stuff to think about, to analyze, to break break down.

An old boss of mine, it’s an old cliche, but an old boss of mine, my first boss in sales, used to constantly be sort of verbally beating us about the head, saying, Paul, you must paint pictures for your customers. Because pictures get right under the radar, people can reject actually, I started my career selling advertising and sponsorship deals. And so people can ignore circulation figures. They can ignore. They can ignore readership flow, they can they can ignore target market penetration, because they can ignore all of that you can argue with that they can argue with the with the research methodology or the assumptions that you based it on. But if you paint a picture for somebody, it gets right under the radar. And the example she used to do and I say it’s a cliche, but it’s always stuck with me is she always used to say, you know, if you can put a picture in someone’s head, like most people today have probably got through the morning without thinking about a hyena. So for the next minute, do not think about hyenas. Okay, especially one with pink fur. Okay, with a little brown monkey riding on its back across this belt. Okay.

We have no filter for the visual for the visual channel. And stories are a very good way of making the experience and how often did we hear that word experience yesterday through all the various present presentations, making the experience real for your, for your your customers.

Stories almost also make things memorable. When I was kind of floating yesterday, lunchtime, and you all naturally started chatting to each other. It was stories that I heard not data. It was well we tried this and you know what it bummed out didn’t work. Or you know, we hired this guy to do our selling, you know, wasted time. Biggest mistake we ever made, we should have done it entirely differently. And they go all the detail all the background, to the to the story. Oh, we had an entirely different experience. We all had the phone, talk to our top 10 downloads and we ask them these questions. And we did that. And you know, we had a real success and it’s the story that engages you do it naturally. It is no accident that every major religion in the world and every major cultural movement in the world is based on a series have stories.

Stories make you make you stick in people’s minds.

They may not, you know, year on year if you if you’re a veteran of these conferences, sometimes you will run into people. And I bet you I heard it happened yesterday, somebody says, Oh, I don’t remember your name, but you’re the guys who. And they recounted the story right back to them, it makes you stick. So stories are just so important. And they’re too important for you to take lightly.

So, next slide is the big point, I guess for the first part of the presentation.

Data explains, stories inspire.

And I tend to find amongst my clients who are the tech clients, biotech, medical clients, software clients, engineering clients, that there is an over reliance on the data. Because that’s what we’re comfortable with, right. But it’s not the data that most people, it’s the stories, it’s how the data was was used, what it means to them. That’s what really matters.

So I’m going to ask you to do a couple of exercises, as we go through the next part of this day, I want you to start thinking about some of the stories that you tell and the stories that you share as part of your as part of your, your your business. And I may I may ask for examples. As we go, we’ll see how the time suits us. That’s just have a quick think about what makes a compelling sales story.

Now, as I said, right at the beginning, I’ve tried to shift my emphasis over the last year, 18 months or so, from selling stuff to people to sharing stories with people because actually, it’s a much more compelling idea. If you say to any of you guys, how many people here fancy the idea when you get back of having to spend a day selling. No real takers then okay.

But a day, sharing relevant stories with people who might appreciate them is an entirely different proposition. But your stories have to be good stories, they have to be easy to tell if it takes you 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes to get into the point of your story, your client is lost. Story should provide a structure for all the stuff you’re trying to do. And I’ll give you some I’ll give you some examples in just a short while, it needs a beginning, a middle and an end. But it doesn’t always need them in that order.

One of the most effective salespeople I know works in the medical field. And he will start his conversations with a client with video of a young guy, a rugby player who is is running out onto a rugby pitch. And he’s doing what a lot of athletes do when they run out and shake his head like that. And he’s shaking his arms and He’s warming. He’s warming up. I’m Fred egg. It’s a game of tag rugby, not full contact rugby that he’s going, he’s running out to do. And what he does is he says he sells prosthetic vertebrae for the cervical vertebra, the top of the spine, and and he says to his surgeons, that’s what we can do. Because this guy couldn’t move his his neck four months ago, he had a rugby accident and he couldn’t move his neck. And he starts at the end. And then he works back to the procedure. And then he works back to the technology. And then he works back to where the idea came from and the people who inspired him and for his particular audience. That’s what they care about. They care about his audience as surgeons, and they care about what they can do for their customer, their patient, if you like. So, always use your story should always have a structure.

They should make complex stuff really accessible. If you think about it. If anybody has looked into the psychology of fairytales what a fairy tales all about. Fairy tales were about teaching quite complex moral issues to kids. And you can’t you can’t lecture them on morality. But you can teach them about running off alone by telling them about Little Red Riding Hood. And you can teach them about envy and jealousy and all those other emotions through through stories. And we can do exactly the same thing. If we want to say if we want to prove usability, a whole load of stats from a bit of customer research about satisfaction about usability. Yes, 48% of people said that this particular feature was either useful or very useful. It’s absolutely stone cold. It means nothing.

Tell me a story about a guy who came to this product cold and was skeptical about using the product and the kinds of things he’s using your product for right now. And you’ve just proven your usability in a much more effective, away, it takes fewer words, you have to use less data. To do it with, as I said, they’ve got to be visceral, they’ve got to be visual. And they engage through tension and release, you know, all the great stories that you’ve ever been told, are the ones you lean into. When they’re told you when they’re told the ones where you, you begin where the the storyteller says, Well, you will never believe what happened next. And they create the tension as people lean lean in.

Now, there’s no reason that just because that’s to do with, you know, storytelling, like a teach to a class, the same thing doesn’t happen in asked our sales stories, where actually, we create the tension sometimes by presenting the problem that was faced by a customer or a client. And the story is more telling when somebody sat there and they said, I have no idea how I would have fixed that. And you raise the tension. And when you raise the tension, people are listening that bit harder to hear what the result was.

So I want you to stories are too important to take lightly for any for any entrepreneur, because it’s your stories that will that will sell you. Now what I’d like you to do, what I’d like to do is take you through a process that I always go through with customers when we would go to work on their sales story.

And yesterday, just before we do that yesterday, Dharmesh said, you know, don’t hire salespeople, until you’ve worked out your cost of sale, and your lifetime value of a transaction or your lifetime value of a customer. And that makes perfect. That makes perfect sense to me. Again, I wish I had gone a step further. Because I would say, don’t hire salespeople until you’ve got all that stuff in place. But don’t hire salespeople until you are sure what your sales story and your sales stories are. Because if you do, you’ll hire inexperienced sales people who will think they know what your sales story. And they will come in. And one guy will be thinking your sales story is all about quick fix sort this solution right now. And somebody else will be thinking this is an enterprise issue. And we should be talking about everything that thing can do. And other people will come in and think that this is about being the cheapest in the market. And we’ve got a vector problem, again, a vector differentiation problem all over again. So make sure you’re clear on your story, and then hire your salespeople too late for some of you I know. But you know, then hire your salespeople. Because that way, you can make sure that when we pick up the phone, and we are articulating the differences of our core, that separators that take us into that area of competitiveness, that we’re all doing it in the same way. And we’re all doing it using the same stories as supporting evidence.

Okay, so this is the process that we use to help people discover the sales story. The first thing we do is we say, stories only matter to people, if they are relevant. Ringing up people and rattling off all the great things you do is a sure way to bore the pants off them, okay to disengage your your, your your customer. And that’s kind of the problem I have with white papers. And with some of the video stock case studies that get put out, now, you’ll get put out in the hope that the right person for that white paper or for that video will log on to it. And will see the whole thing through. But in that process, there’s a whole load of people who aren’t the right people who will start reading it. And these people aren’t, these aren’t the right company. For me, this is not the solution for me, because it’s not talking to their segment to their need.

So the first thing we’ve got to do is to work out who your segments are, then we talk about the need behind the need. And I refer to this last year, and I’ll touch on it again, right now. And then I do an exercise with people, which I would encourage you to do with your own staff when you get back to the office called the decision tree. And we’ll start with the customers segmentation. The truth is, you know, it’s no no rocket science to say all customers are not equal. All customers have different views. We know this, there’s nothing. There’s nothing strange, but we tend to treat them often as if they are. We tend to think that if we produce this white paper, or we put this blog out that everybody will read the same things into it. The one thing that your blog or white papers or anything else like that anything that’s one way communication cannot do is it can’t just tailor the story. Like it can if you’re talking to somebody, whether it be on the telephone at a conference, even in a Twitter conversation to a degree you can pick up clues about people, people, so it doesn’t it doesn’t it doesn’t tailor the story to the specifics of people. So we tend to create this mishmash general client. And the worst people for doing this are advertising agencies. An example of this is Simon, Simon is our user. Well hang on a second, you know, how many different types of Simon’s are there.

Some of the people, some of the segments of your customers, and I won’t tell you how to segment your customers, the group is too diverse, and you know, much better than I do. But when you look at customers, and you look at segments, some of the segments will be people who have come to your website for a download, because they are looking for a quick fix. And the only thing that they care about is time to fix, from from hitting your website, to downloading to fixing my problem, that’s all they care about. And if they talk to somebody they want to hear who had the same problem as me, and who fixed it quickly.

Some of your segments might be people in the same sort of organization. But I’ve got a different set of concerns. They’re sitting there thinking, I’ve got 20 software developers working for me, and I have practically run out of budget. And every penny now that I spend has got to be justified to my boss, who doesn’t know the first thing about the project that we’re working on. And the story they want to hear is not how quick you can fix stuff, they want to hear who else is using this? And how did they justify the the solution in their organization, you get my you get my major. So the first thing we do the first thing you should do if you try this exercise, three step exercise, and believe me, you can spend an entire afternoon or a day or longer on this. But the first thing you do is you say Who are our customers? What are the different segments if we were going to have some fun with this and segment them not by age, not by geography, not by job type, but by behavior. What type of buyer are they?

You’ll start to really you’ll start to have these little inspirations, little light bulbs will go on you sort of thing. Yeah. So that then we’ve had that before. We’ve been through this, we’ve sorted this problem for other people, and they’re in law, your stories. So start by just putting up the the segments.

I’ll just tell you a quick a quick story. Very good friend of mine, strategy lecture that I know, was at a conference. And she she made a joke about petrol gasoline. And she said, You know, sometimes I wish we were just selling gas, because that’s really easy. How hard is it to sell? How hard is it to sell gas? You know, because the needle hits the red line. I need some gas and you pull into the station, and you fill up and everyone well, yeah, wouldn’t that be great. And of course, that was the one conference where a hand goes up at the back. And this guy goes, Excuse me, I work for Royal Dutch Shell. And let me tell you, I work in the sales and marketing. And let me tell you, there’s nothing easy about selling gas. Yeah, and they have something like 32 different customer segments for people who buy gas. Because we write Can you imagine? Okay, and some of the ones off the top of my head they have the time stressed business motorist, the time stress business motorists, the person that has their mileage paid maybe has a company car, you know the thing that they value most that segment values most about a about the petrol buying experience. Free stuff, points, glasses, all the stuff that you get given away the quality of the coffee. They don’t care about the price at all. They care about where the stations are because they want them to be there and open at five o’clock in the morning when they’re heading off on a business trip.

Compare that to the time stressed. So the time stressed private motorist, somebody like my wife who is constantly abandoned by her husband, because often jaunt to San Francisco in places like that. And she’s got three kids to manage. She has a whole range of other responsibilities. And when she got pulls into a petrol station, she’s a private motorist. So she does clock the price. She doesn’t know the price are there, but she also cares more about speed of turnaround. She likes places where you can pay at the pump. She likes places that are clean. She likes places where she has a direct line of sight to the car, because there’s often to at least two of our three kids in the car and she doesn’t want to have to get them all out and so and there are loads and loads of other segments. So you see, you can have a lot of fun. Just mucking around with the segments. And then you start to think that starts you thinking about the stories that you can tell, you can tell people.

The next thing is we talked about this last year, understanding the need behind the need. I thought it was fascinating, where Dan’s presentation yesterday, and I don’t know how many times he reiterated the experience, you know, and, and I thought Hurray, fantastic. Because this is what every good sales entrepreneur knows, they do not just buy your product because it works. They do not just buy your product, because of the features that are that are on there.

They buy your product, because it fulfills some other experience for them, it makes them feel good.

I was the first person in this company to bring in this piece of software that changed our lives. Ego, alpha male number one, that was me, I brought it in. These are my guys don’t talk to my suppliers, I brought these guys in other people, it’s all about security. These people are interested, and stories that you’ve got about happy customers, and how long you’ve had those happy customers. Quoting a couple of testimonials isn’t good enough. We first worked with these people in 1997, when we were a bootstrap organization, and they came to us with this problem. Now that 1997 is the key thing. For somebody who’s driven their need behind the need is security. For some people, it’s all about ease about convenience, is this going to be a pain in the ass to get through my purchasing department, my CFO, my CEO, is this something that’s why the price point becomes so important. Is this something I can slide through on my credit card, I’m gonna have to go and get a signature for it?

The story behind your price point is sometimes the most compelling thing.

For others, it’s about gain. It’s about ROI. And the stories of what people actually got by using the actually got by using the your product, I was talking this morning at breakfast, to Ted, whose software company delivers solutions for subcontractors in the building in the building industry. And the more we talked about it, the more we sort of realized that actually, you know, what the what these people really care about is not being organized or not being you know, having a good project flow or all that what they care about is the speed at which they can respond to a customer’s query when somebody rings up and says, my roof need fix needs fixing. They know that the guy who responds fastest has an advantage. Because you look efficient and you feel you feel efficient. So how will the product gauge those stories that really, that really, that really matter? And belonging? Who else is using this product? Because we live in a connected world and a world that Twitter’s who else uses this product? And why did they use it? And what do they say about it, those stories become hugely compelling.

Of course, people’s needs DNA varies. So it’s never any one thing. It’s usually a mixture of stuff. And you can’t sell stories to people unless you know what drives their, their their DNA, their needs DNA. And in this case, with somebody like this, who’s huge on ego and huge on belonging, you want to tell them stories about people that they think are important, our thought leaders who are using your product or recommending your product or have commented on your, your product. In something like this.

You need to talk about those long term relation those long term relationships. So you never ever, ever know what some what story somebody’s interested in, unless you do what Geoffrey Moore said yesterday, which was to do that talking to customers, with your hands behind your back, no PowerPoint, questioning, listening, and not just talking to people who are on your support groups and on your user groups who love you and think you’re great anyway, and we’ll tell you loads of nice stuff anyway, but talking to the people who downloaded your product, and didn’t buy it.

Talking to the people who downloaded your product, bought it as Dharmesh said yesterday, dropped in their use of the product or only using a small part of the of the process. So you’ve got to think about the DNA, the DNA.

You’ve also got to do a decision tree exercise. And again, you can take this back. This is a little basic because it’s all I could fit on a slide but when I do this with clients, we will often take a piece of a white roll of paper 10 feet long and we start at one end with the current situation which is somebody may possibly be injured. crusted in our product. And at the other end of the piece of paper, we have the that they have become a customer, they have said yes. And a really interesting exercise to do is to talk about their psychological journey from vaguely interested. I’ve downloaded it because I downloaded half a dozen things that were vaguely recommended about this this area. And at the other end, they have said yes to you, and I want you to end you imagine, into the future, you project into the future. And you say, you say, if they were a customer, if they said yes, if they’ve swipe their card, or you know, sent you the money, what questions would they have needed to have had affirmative answers to, in order for them to become a customer.

And again, I can give you some basic examples here. But if you do this for your for your product, you know your customers, really well, you should go out and ask your customers, but the sorts of things that come out, you know, does it work? You’ll see, does this product work? Does it do what it says on the on the 10? It’s only really ever a small part of it? Can I work with these guys? Will they support me? How the heck am I going to persuade other people in our business, my boss, that this is a good idea? How am I going to persuade the team that this is a great idea? How am I going to justify this in terms of training in terms of integration, all of these things become questions that they need an answer to, before they can say yes.

And what a good storyteller knows, is that before they start telling the story, if they’ve got a map of the questions that their story has to take, you start to realize that you’ve got quite a journey to to go up. It takes no special skills, it takes a couple of big whiteboards, it takes a couple of hours at the at the outside to, to draw this map, and you should do it. And you should get everybody who has any customer contact, directly or indirectly, involved in this exercise. If you do nothing else in this presentation, but this, I promise you, you will find at least 10 different ways to articulate your sales story more effectively to the customer. Have to push on a little.

And when you’ve done that, you ask yourself from your own sales. So again, I can’t tell you what they say is what our true strengths are strategic assets are strategic assets are defined as those things which are rare, valuable, and difficult to imitate. So what do we do? That answers those questions. And which of them are rare, valuable and difficult to imitate? All the other stuff that we do. Nice packaging, nice user interface that, you know, that’s the same as everybody else, our entry assets.

If you want to be in the shoe business, you need certain entry assets, you need shoes, you need a shop, you know, you need a tell, and you need a bit of advertising. If you want to stand out in the shoe business, you need a unique line or unique appeal to a customer. So what are the thing? And once you’ve got a list of these, you ask yourself the question What are our stories that prove this?

And this is where sometimes when people do this, it’s not something you do all in one go. You ask yourself, you put the decision tree up, you put the DNA of your various, your various customers up. And you leave it up for a week. And you ask people by the end of the week, I want 50 stories on there that prove that we can do this. And as people go through their working week, yeah, you know what, there’s this feature that we’ve never done anything where that works really well. But actually, let’s put that in there. And there was this customer who we sold to a year ago, pretty much we’ve forgotten about. But they sent us this testimonial or story and you dig up all sorts of stuff, you leave that stuff up, I promise you and you just have post it notes on the on the on the wall as you go, you’ll find your stories.

So that’s how you find your stories, you find stories that will resonate with your customers with your customer. Just shouting stuff doesn’t do it doesn’t cut it. That’s just bullshit. But you know, coming up with stuff that resonates for your customer, really, really matters.

Great Stories to Tell: Origins

And just to give you an example of how to share some of these stories, some of the stories that really worked, but in my experience working with customers really really work clients like stories about origins.

The Genesis, if you like of your, your product, your company, one of my clients over the years over the past 10 years or so it’s a company called Hobson’s, they’re based in Cincinnati, they started out if anybody, you may even come across some of their products, they used to do digital view books and CD ROMs and DVDs that promoted various colleges across North America, and to students, and that was their, that was their, their business. And their, their former CEO, Chris Klein, and a good friend of mine never gets bored of telling the story about the launch of their EMT product, which is an enrollment management technology product for graduates for colleges. And he always tells a story to customers, because in fact, he’s retired now, and he still tells the story, I don’t know how that works. But, you know, he always tells about sitting in a particular graduate recruitment office at this very specific university somewhere in the Midwest, with a a couple of people from their marketing team. And as they were talking about what they wanted for their on their CD ROM or their digital viewbook. This year, he noticed that there were there all around them were piles of paper, on chairs, and he said, you know, just out of interest, what are all these piles of paper? And the and the enrollment officer said, Oh, they are there. They’re all the inquiries we’ve had by email. This was 10 years ago, I’d say that all the inquiries we’ve had from email, and what what do you do with them so well, we we’ve only got one PC in the department. So we have to print them off. And and then we put them in a pile, and then we work our way through them. So some student who’s at the cutting edge at the time has a PC at home. And it’s one of the prolific, you know, PCs started to proliferate at home sending, they’re sending their inquiry by email, and it’s treated like snail mail. And he and Chris walked out there. And he said, we can do something about this. And they went off. And they partnered with the University of California, and they came up with this product DMT. And it’s hugely successful, not only here in North America, it sells in Europe and in Australia, as well.

But what does that story do? Because it’s, you know, the whole process, how you put together is a bit of a long, you know, a bit of a long story. But when you tell it like that the person who’s listening to it, when they first were taking on this technology had sat there and been in that room, everybody he told that story to had sat in a similar room with similar piles of paper. And if people buy into your origins, they buy your story. And they feel part of you as an organization. And that makes your relationship with them sticky.

So once you’ve got your big charter up, and you’re thinking, how do we prove that. So it’s not just origins of the company, its origins of the product origins at the update, or the next release, or all of those sorts of things, the more people feel they understand it, they feel part of the family. And it’s a great way to articulate what you’re really about the experience. People often remember extremes last year in Boston. After we were done at the conference, I took a few of the Redgate guys and a couple of other people we will I took them all to the pizzeria Regina, because I used to work there in the mid 80s As a student on exchange, and the pizzeria Regina, if anybody has been there. It’s in the north end of Boston, the traditional Italian and of Boston. The pizza is great, but it’s all very, you know, everything arrives on a paper plate. And for maker table tops. The waitresses are spectacularly rude in a way that only Italian American waitresses seem to be able to do. Their spectacularly rude but also amazingly charming. And I’ve never worked out how they, they do that. And when I worked there, when I worked there, 25 years ago, as a student, that 18 year old student, they used to talk about all the time about this guy they used to say, because they you know, they used to just even though I told him, I wasn’t from London, they assumed I was and they used to say, Oh, we had a guy who flew pizzas, you know, from Boston to London, because he missed his pizzas. And it was apparently and he showed me this article that was in 1984. The article was from 1974. And when we went back last year, and I asked the manager, they’re still telling that story. Okay.

So story stick. I don’t know whether this guy’s here today. But here’s an extreme. Here’s an extreme. There’s a story to tell. Somebody loved our product so much that they had a tattoo that can only be Redgate and Harley Davidson are the only two companies I can think of and Atari and sequel but so ask yourself, what are our extremes? Ask yourself for stories of rescues. Every rescue you’ve got in your cut in your your history is a great story to tell, because rescues create tension. This was the problem and if you can talk about a problem or an issue or a crisis that people that resonates with people, they listen to you. And the solution was, that’s why we love a rescue movie. They build up and build up and build up The Towering Inferno. And then the hero comes in and saves the day. It works. And people listen to that.

Great Stories to Tell: Journeys

Journey journeys, client journeys, a great story to tell. I hope, Dan at Fog Creek doesn’t mind me saying this. But I spent a couple of days with the guys at Fog Creek in the in the summer. And although I don’t want to deluge, Joe, Joe with visitors, it’s really is a great place. And the lunches really are great. And we were I was chatting, chatting with Dan about Stack Overflow. And we were we’ve been talking about sales stories. And we were talking about copilot and fog bugs and all this sort of stuff. And we were chatting about psycho fun. And that’s it? Well, you know, it’s a great product, but you know, really, it’s a recruitment product. And, you know, I can say this is this many people, you know, will will look at jobs on StackOverflow. And this and I said, Hang on a second. There’s a story here, because actually finding jobs is a really impersonal business, when you go to monster or total jobs or any of the big the big site. But when you take somebody on a journey, and this is where you know, people, people like you, you know, they don’t go to Stack Overflow to look for a job. They land on Joel on software, because they’ve given themselves five minute break, or they want a little creative left, or they want to get angry about something or they want to, you know, engage in some way. And while they’re doing that and look at other things, something from Stack Overflow starts to click. And oh, I wonder what that is. So they have a look. So the types of people who following their journey on to Stack Overflow and then into applying is entirely different from the guys who go out and swamp the the job boards. Because actually, this little journey proves that the sorts of people we can get you are people who are not looking for jobs, who have switched into the market who care passionately about software development, because they wouldn’t be reading that blog if they if they weren’t. And that little journey, even though it’s three or four steps is a very compelling story to Stack Overflow.

So think about the journeys from interested your customers from interested through to customer. What can that journey, tell other customers about you?

Great Stories to Tell: Relationships

Relationships, relationships, you know, romance, bromance, for those of you if we look at relationships, stories about for those of you who’ve got security and belonging as your as your major drivers of your buying DNA, they want to hear stories about the people you’ve worked with, and how long you’ve worked with them and who you know, and why people work with you. And all of those sorts of things. Redemption, all your cock UPS could potentially be fantastic stories.

I have a client and a very good friend of mine who runs a marketing company in London. He does a lot of work for Google. He he organizes the zeitgeist in Europe and things like things like that. And he will often tell him and tell the story of the time that he booked Concorde for Motorola, it was the most expensive thing he’d ever done. But when Concorde was still flying, he booked it to take a whole bunch of people from a trade show for a fly around the Bay of Biscay and back and they designed to stand for Motorola that was a departure gate. And everybody went through and all these kind of major main Motorola do dealers had the wow factor. Wow. You’ve hired Concorde for that. It’s amazing. You know, it cost him a quarter million quid you know, all this and he had all these people at Birmingham Airport, waiting to waiting for Concorde to land and the excitement was building up. There’s a Dixie band playing there’s all of this sort of stuff, you know, and then he gets a call to our friends here. We’re terribly sorry. There’s been a fault on Concord, and we can’t come today. Yeah. If you’re the male, if you’re the organizer, you mentioned how that makes you feel. And he ended up he had to apologize to the 30, 40 most important dealers in Europe, you know, multimillion pound deals and they were angry and they were disappointed and they felt they’ve been conned and whatever. But what he will also tell you is that purely by Philip fee, he got on the phone to Air France and he said, You can’t leave me hanging like this. So they said, look, we’ve we’ve got one day free. And, and we can do a trip where we take half the people out to France and we can take half the people back to London and you can entertain them all while the they’re there. And he was so lucky because the day the only day they had free happened to be the day of the World Cup final soccer finals, where France were playing Brazil and and they beat them three nil and they were just coming out of the restaurant as the stadium doors open. And then Paris went into a party. But what he will tell you and he tells, what his story tells clients is that we are a brave company, we will, we will take on big, scary jobs. And we will live with the occasional problems, and will turn them to our advantage. And that story tells all of those things. Stories about the future, are really important stories about where we’re going, share the stories about what the product will look like, in 12 months time in 18 months time two years time. And people get excited about it for the same reason, they get excited get excited about origins.

Paul Kenny 

So if you take something from this session, I would ask you to simply do this, go back to your offices, gather some of your people around and say, Do you know what were all the sales function. And we can’t have a crappy sales function just because we choose to ignore it, we’ve got to have a great sales function. And in order to have a great sales function, it’s much more exciting to share compelling stories and relevant stories with our customers than just pitching people. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to work out what our stories are. And do the process go through the process that I’ve just that I’ve just described. And, and the stories will start appearing. And if you involve everybody in that, then anybody who picks up the phone has heard the stories you brought them from the the tacit or the implicit to the explicit. And that’s what we want to do. The more people get the story, the more people will share the passion of the leader, the passionate leader that Ryan was referring to earlier. So there’s a lot more to sales a lot more than we can cover in this session. Just telling stories isn’t the whole thing. There’s a whole host of other things. But if you do this, and if you have great stories, if you have really great stories, then all this other stuff gets to be easier to focus on your stories.

So Dharmesh, there were no cats killed in the making of this presentation. But as with last last year, I’m going to write up this in the next couple of days, the stuff we’ve talked about, I’ll write up the process for you, if you want a copy of that, just send me an email, or LinkedIn, and let me know and I will, I will gladly send you a copy. But it’s a trade off. If I do, I want you to send me an email when you’ve done the exercises and how to go at it told me how you got on told me what you think your stories, your stories are? Because that way, we will, we will benefit. So guys, we have a couple of minutes. Thank you very much for your time. I hope that’s been useful for you.

Okay, I’m happy to take questions if anybody has a question. Hi.

Q&A

Paul Kenny

Yeah, so the question was, how does that translate, if you’re, if you’re simply selling on selling online? Well, I think it on one level it translates into, the more stories you’ve got, the more creative you can be about the way you express what you can do on online. So instead of it being the same standard three videos or whatever, you’ve got more, and you can constantly, you can constantly change them. But I would refer you back to last year when I said in the presentation, that, you know, when you’re selling online, there’s a whole bunch of people who download and buy. And in many ways they already get it, they’re fine. They know the product they know it will do stuff will do the right stuff for them. It’s the people who download it and don’t buy who benefit most from the stories because the reason they don’t buy are because I never got around to it, I didn’t have a sense of urgency. I don’t know how to explain this to my boss, I haven’t got the power to sign up. It’s all of those things, which is, in my view, what a salesperson should do.

All those first sales are really marketing. And the salesperson kicks in after that, and I would encourage you to say I would encourage you to if you have the time or you can make the time to spend some time looking at all those people that you’ve paid to market to to get the download, but didn’t quite say yes to the product, because there’s often a little Goldmine there for you. I hope that answers your question. Yep. Thank you.

Paul Kenny 

Yes, hi. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. The question was, what’s the rule of thumb on how short? That’s a piece of string question. If you’re sitting in front of a customer face to face, and they, and they say, tell me about you guys, and what are you, what do you about, then you can you can talk all day, if you’ve got the if you’ve got the time and they’re interested. But sometimes it’s little things. The story can be as short as you know, these people brought this problem to us, which sounds very much like yours. And this is what we did. You know, the story can be just as compelling. And quick, it’s a judgment call. So I’d love to tell you there was a rule of thumb, but there isn’t. It’s a joke. It’s a judgment. It’s a judgment call.

It’s more about making sure that there’s enough of them stuck up somewhere and not in a little file Mark stories on the J drive, you know that they’re stuck up on the wall and stuck up places where people can see where they’re constantly reminded that they’re there. Thank you.

Paul Kenny 

Hi. Stories have to be true. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. And yes. I think that, while the ones that sometimes don’t turn out to be true, are the ones where you’re telling stories about the future. And this is what we intend to do. But actually, those become very good redemption stories, because it’s interesting. So we thought the market was going to do this. We never saw X happening completely blindsided us. And occasionally stories can be analogies, which aren’t true. It’s a bit like, you know, playing golf or you know, whatever. But generally speaking, we live in to connect to the world, although it’s always a bad idea to pull the wool over people’s eyes we live in to connect to the world, and you will get caught out it’s hard to remember too many false stories, you’ll you’ll get caught out somewhere along the line.

Paul Kenny 

Hi. Okay, so if you’ve been in business for a long time

Well, if you’re just setting up this actually, that’s your story. You know, the reason that you came into the market you know, what, within the niche you saw the the people that have decided to, you know, the fact that you gave up your job to back your dream as it were, or to back your hunch about the market is just about the most compelling story. That’s why a huge global phenomenon. The last TV phenomena has been the Dragon’s Den. franchise, which has run around the world where people pitch their business ideas. It’s compelling TV, why not? Because the business idea compelling TV, because somebody’s standing there, and they will they want to put their all into it. And that’s why there’s no need to tell false stories. Because whatever you’ve got is what you’ve got. The trick is turning it into something that’s compelling for the customer.

Paul Kenny 

Hello. Um, the press? Yeah. Yeah. The Press, in my experience, and I worked in the press for many, many years, a cynical bunch of deviants, who, I think I’ve done that polarizing thing again, and just killed any chance of good publicity for ocean learning. Those cynical bunch of DVDs. And so the answer is no, but they are human. And they are often huge ease buyers in their DNA, there’s a lot of ease. So the more you know about what their editor or their content manager is hammering them about, right now, that’s the thing to put into your into your story. Again, the products and the companies are just too diverse, and the press too diverse to give you a straight answer, but they are just as human, they’re just a bit more cynical, and a bit harder to get through. The Press are always more impressed when somebody else tells them your story than when you tell them your story. And that will be my strategy for you.

Paul Kenny 

Yes. Customers Yeah. Mistakes were made. Yeah.

Yeah, you can you can tell the story about you know, Company X, Acme software, yeah, you can go down that line. But every time you remove a piece of the jigsaw, the story becomes less compelling. So what I tend to do is I just tend to say to customers, do you mind if we talk about this sort of stuff, because we think that although at the time, it caused us both a lot of stress, what we did together as a result of it, you know, we learned something that put us in a place in the market that nobody else had been. And I tend to go with that approach where I Can with the amended names have been changed to protect the innocent approach as a sort of second choice because simply because, you know, it’s the characters that make the story and if you have to make the characters up, the story loses some of its, its its compelling nature. Thank you.

Paul Kenny 

Are we done? Okay, I’m here for the rest of the conference. So happy to answer and pick up questions also informally over there. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Paul Kenny

Paul Kenny is the founder of Ocean Learning.

Paul has been a regular attendee at Business of Software Conference since it started in 2007 and has spoken several times. For good reason.

Over the last 25 years, he has helped to develop salespeople and sales managers working in media, technology and the professional services sectors. Since his first talk in Boston in 2008, Paul has explored the many different approaches that you may take to developing a robust and sustainable sales effort.

More recently, Paul has been running online workshops, coaching and training events for companies across the world. He is a keen cyclist and owns more bikes than there are days in the week.

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