GrowthGenius’ Tactical Guide to Sales: Stop Selling, Start Helping (Lesson 1 of 23)

That’s right.

Stop selling.

Your customers are sold to 1000 times a day.

Often terribly. Sometimes decently. Seldom well.

They’ve been told enough times “buy my stuff”.

They’re tired of it.

Counterintuitively most people think sales is about pushing their idea, product, service or company, but the best salespeople in the world are actually the best listeners. They focus on understanding customers and their problems, not on pushing solutions.

During a sales conversation, they listen over 80% of the time. If you don’t believe us, start using “Chorus.ai — Automatically record, transcribe and analyze meetings in real-time. Gain critical insight into your sales opportunities and meeting performance.”

Why do they listen so much? Because they’re trying to help you. The only way they can help is to deeply understand your problems through the lens of their company’s product or service.

Once you and a salesperson have taken the time to fully understand each other’s respective situations can you begin to help each other.

One of the more effective ways to do this is using a framework for relationship-based selling (strikethrough) helping. It follows a very basic formula:

1. Relate
2. Discover
3. Advocate
4. Support

Don’t take our word for it. Jeffrey Goodman, a Wharton Prof, has spent 20+ years thinking about how to help people effectively.

(The good stuff starts at 16:59)

Old Way vs New Way

Sales has changed — but most of the world just doesn’t know it yet.

How most sales (& marketing) people view a sales or marketing funnel

Folks think of sales and marketing as a series of assets / messages linearly deployed against a lead / opportunity / prospect to sell them.

People aren’t sold things. People buy things.

How sales is actually done

Great sales is about having a great conversation.

Great conversations can now be facilitated automatically, at scale.

We can use machine learning to help with the following:

1. Listen — track over 70 buy signals to find opportunities your company is uniquely qualified to help with.
2. Relate — find out commonalities between you and your audience
3. Discover — choose an ideal customer profile, and buyer personas within a company. Understand the important pieces of data that would lend someone to buying your solution
4. Advocate — select and optimize email templates (value propositions)
5. Support — determine the attributes of your best customers and find look-a-like audiences to target
6. Analyze & Optimize — choose the right times of day and week to reach out

Sales is moving to a series of trigger-based, well-timed messages that upload information in precisely the right order to a prospect or prospects (in the case of selling an entire company) minds over time. These well-coordinated messages build a relationship with your audience by educating, entertaining and subtly selling them a better version of the world.

As demonstrated by the above image, you can see that sales isn’t a linear process. It’s messy, complicated and takes time to educate, and build trust, but once you’ve figured out the formula, it’s an extremely powerful tool in a company’s arsenal to help.

This is also just one example of a sales funnel, there are many variations of the above. Take time to figure out which one works for you and your company.

We’re not Salespeople

We’re problem solvers.

Our job is not to sell you.

Our job is to make you as successful as we can.

If that involves using our service — great. If not, no sweat.

We’d rather build trust, educate & enlighten by sharing a perspective that we’ve spent years crafting and if / when this becomes a trusting, respectful relationship, we can see if there’s an opportunity to help you get more of what you want.

Why? Because if we do our job well, you’ll know if we can help. If we can’t help you, you might know of someone we can. And you might let them know that our content can help.

Ideas to Help You Help Others

We’ll be helping you facilitate great conversations by giving you a little flavor of the below over the coming weeks.

Sales Campaign Ingredients

1. Ideal Customer Profiles (Lesson 2 of 23)
2. Buyer Personas (Lesson 3 of 23)
3. Value Propositions (Lesson 4 of 23)
4. Helpful Assets — Past Sales & Marketing Emails, Case Studies, Videos, Ebooks, Articles, etc. (Lesson 5 of 23)
5. Facts & Statistics (Lesson 6 of 23)
6. Competitive Research (Lesson 7 of 23)
7. Trigger Events / Buy Signals (Lesson 8 of 23)

Campaign Overview & Creation

1. Narrative Arc (Lesson 9 of 23)
2. The Lead (Opener) Email (Lesson 10 of 23)
3. Follow Up Emails (Lesson 11 of 23)
4. Break Up Email (Lesson 12 of 23)

Sales Copywriting Fundamentals

1. General Copywriting Tips (Lesson 13 of 23)
2. Subject Lines (Lesson 14 of 23)
3. Opener (Research) — Data-driven Hooks (Lesson 15 of 23)
4. Prospects Pain Points (Prescribe) (Lesson 16 of 23)
5. Body (Relevance) — Social Proof, Social Engineering, R-CLASS (Lesson 17 of 23)
6. Call to Action (Propose) (Lesson 18 of 23)
7. Signatures (Lesson 19 of 23)

Campaign Analysis & Optimization

1. Timing (Lesson 20 of 23)
2. Metrics to Track (Lesson 21 of 23)
3. A/B & Multivariate Testing (Lesson 22 of 23)
4. Adding Channels (Lesson 23 of 23)

We’ll be adding new posts each week.