7 Ways to Sell What Customers Value

In this episode of "How To Sell More," host Mark Drager sits down with Gary Arnold, a seasoned sales expert with a track record at giants like Amazon, GoDaddy, and PayPal. Gary shares his insights for boosting sales: it's all about really getting to know your customers.

He breaks down why understanding what your clients truly need is the key to growing your business. Plus, he dishes out practical tips on how to talk about your product in a way that makes decision-makers sit up and take notice.

Whether you're a start-up founder or part of a big company's sales team, this chat is packed with ideas you can use right away to connect better with your customers and sell more.

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Your customers are who are going to give you money, plain and simple. And if you don't fulfill their needs, they stop giving you money. -- Gary Arnold

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Listen to The Episode!

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

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Gain insights on maintaining customer focus in large organizations: Gary describes practical methods he's used at companies like GoDaddy and PayPal, such as sitting in on call centre conversations and participating in sales calls to stay connected with customer needs.

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Learn why overcomplicating your sales pitch can backfire: Gary explains how introducing too many features or benefits can actually increase risk for the buyer and potentially derail a deal. He uses an example of how mentioning cost savings to a growth-focused prospect might unnecessarily bring the CFO into the conversation, complicating the sale.

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Discover a unique approach to market research: Gary shares his tactic of scheduling customer interviews through an intermediary, without revealing his company affiliation. This approach allows him to gather more honest, unfiltered insights about customers' core challenges.

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Follow Gary Arnold on Social

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Website: https://etw.com/mastermind/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyarnold/

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More About Today's Guest, Gary Arnold

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Growth Leader / Value Creator - Ex. Amazon, PayPal, GoDaddy

Gary Arnold is a dynamic leader with extensive experience in both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, PayPal, and GoDaddy. With a career spanning over two decades, he has played pivotal roles in shaping innovative products and driving value creation across various sectors. Gary's journey includes leading the formative stages of Amazon Pay and scaling Hu’s digital division, showcasing his ability to navigate both corporate and entrepreneurial landscapes.

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Beyond his corporate achievements, Gary's diverse background as a charter boat captain and ski instructor enriches his leadership perspective, emphasizing the importance of adaptability and creativity in problem-solving. He is passionate about aligning teams towards common goals, fostering a culture of accountability, and creating value for all stakeholders—customers, investors, employees, and the broader ecosystem.

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In his discussions, Gary emphasizes the significance of emotional energy and connectedness in leadership. He advocates for a customer-obsessed approach and highlights the importance of transparency in building trust within organizations. His insights on pattern recognition and cultural transformation provide actionable strategies for leaders looking to enhance their impact.

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Gary is also a proponent of continuous improvement through peer groups and masterminds, believing that effective leadership balances confidence with vulnerability. His commitment to empowering others and creating meaningful connections makes him a valuable resource for anyone looking to drive growth and innovation in their organization.

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Key Takeaways

• Customer-centric focus is crucial for business success - Customer-centricity involves deeply understanding needs, engaging directly and regularly with customers, and prioritizing their value over internal capabilities or competitor focus, all of which are essential for maintaining relevance and developing effective solutions in a competitive market.

• Effective communication of value proposition is vital in sales - Successful value communication entails simplifying complex offerings to address specific pain points, quantifying tangible benefits in terms of customer outcomes, and aligning the value message with the customer's key performance metrics to increase its impact and resonance.

• Continuous market engagement and adaptability drive growth - Sustained growth requires businesses to regularly reassess customer needs, approach market research with an open mind (sometimes without revealing company affiliation), and recognize that customer perceptions of value may differ from internal assumptions, allowing for more accurate refinement of offerings and marketing strategies.

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A Transcription of The Talk

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Mark Drager: So if you're a business owner, or you work for a business owner, sales and marketing teams, often, I find that people fall into a few camps. They either do not want more sales, because they are like, listen, we could not possibly take any more sales, and they do zero sales. They do zero marketing. And quite honestly, that might work in some really niche industries, but for the most part, we all want more growth. If you're listening to this podcast, you want more growth. And where we run into trouble, in my experience, is when a business owner or team they're not fully sure of who they are and how to explain what they do in really clear and simple terms and why someone should pick them. So you might want to look inwards, or they're not sure about the marketplace. They don't know their competitors, they don't know what they're really up against. And so you definitely want to look at competitors, and then the third pillar, or the third category, would definitely be your ideal customers, your very best customers, your high-value customers. Quite honestly, most marketing teams are not that close to customers, and most executives in leadership are not that close to customers, but salespeople and onboarding people and account managers and customer service reps and everyone who's really, really close to the customers they hear all day, every day, what customers love and what they hate, and what they want and what they desire. And so Gary, before we hit record, I was asking you a bit about where, where our zone of genius and where we want to focus the conversation. And you have had a remarkable career. You've taken me through this and even if we had half an hour to just dedicate to all of the companies that you've worked at and all of the moves you made in your career. I don't think we could cover everything but, you mentioned focusing on your customers. Why is this something that you have spent so much time on? Why is it that when people are working with you as a board member or as a leader, they're bringing you on to help lead their sales and marketing teams? Why do you focus on this as opposed to the other two pillars that I mentioned?

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Gary Arnold: Your customers are who are going to give you money, plain and simple. And if you don't fulfill their needs, they stop giving you money. And when you stop getting money, your business stops thriving. And that's a bit of a lighthearted oversimplification, but the bottom line is, until something gets sold, none of the rest of it matters. You know? I mean, businesses exist to solve problems for people, but in order to do that, you have to trade value for money, and that's how you can create more value. So bottom line, if you're focused too much on the competitor, if you're focused too much on internal capability or internal ability, you can really miss the customer need, and that is always going to be the most critical, because as soon as that starts to drift, as soon as you are no longer in touch with your customer, as soon as you don't really tactically understand their day to day and the problems that they face in their day to day, your solutions are going to stop evolving and stop being as relevant, and eventually somebody will come in with a better solution that knows that customer better, and they're going to take the business from you.

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Mark Drager: Now, within my agency, within Sales Loop, you know, we are a brand strategy company, and people hire us to come in and do market research, do audience research, interview their best customers, interview the people who don't want to work with them. We look at the market. I have my own process for how I go about this, but I will be quite honest with you, I have not. I've never worked in a corporation that has been forced to do this internally, right? We're an agency that's hired externally, and I know how to come in and look from the outside, but when you're looking from the inside, this must be hard. And I say that because it seems like almost every company faces this challenge. And so why is this so hard? Why is it so hard for leadership, salespeople, marketing, advertising, clients, and all of the different departments that actually can touch and impact the sale, the lead gen, and the client delivery? Why is it so hard to figure this stuff out?

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Gary Arnold: There are kind of two core reasons, in my experience. One is that you are too close to the solution from a technical perspective. I'm not technical I come from broadly the sales and marketing side. But when you're around something day to day, and you sell it every day, and you are in the market, you're going to know it at a much deeper, more granular, more technical level than your customers are ever going to do. Right? And there's a temptation always, then, to show the depth and breadth of everything that you can do. And I see that as a stumbling block in sales processes all the time, we've identified value, the customer has identified a problem that this solution may solve, and they're focused, and they're engaged, and they're talking to you, and moving the sales process forward. And then you get tempted to say, Oh, and by the way, it can do X and Y and Z, and that has unintended consequences. You know, that can break the deal. You, you're selling a solution that you know, perhaps drives leads more efficiently, drives leads at a lower cost, or helps accelerate the sales process. And so this is a growth value proposition, right? And in that, you're probably talking to the head of sales, the head of growth, the head of e-commerce channel, or whatever your audience is on that side, they're probably thinking about how this solution drives growth for them. If you then introduce an additional aspect of the value that may save them money, you might unintentionally get some other constituents from their side, the CFO may come in and want to talk about how this works. That can be beneficial if the CFO is also sold on this. But if the CFO is not sold on it, it may kill the entire deal. Close the deal that's in front of you. Expand the value and the capability set when you need to during the sales process to move it forward if it's stalled, but don't introduce things until and unless they are needed, because, again, it's very tempting to do when you know the product as well as you do, and you have that kind of depth and technical acumen and I think it's very human to want backup, you know, to want, you know, well, if the whole organization that I'm selling to wants it, then I'll definitely get the deal. That's true. But convincing the whole organization that they want it is a much steeper thing than a single potential buyer being advanced.

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Mark Drager: When you overcomplicate things, it also increases the potential risk for the buyer to have more exposure to other stakeholders. Now this is suddenly a much more complicated deal. There's more on the line. If it goes wrong, they're going to have spent more money or wasted money, or they're gonna look terrible. And I mean, at the end of the day, every single person we're trying to sell to wants to look good to somebody, right? Like, status drives so much of what we do, whether we're aware of it or not. And so when you think you are introducing more benefits and more features and more things we can do, you're potentially just making everything way more complicated and higher risk for the person who has to say yes. You think you're adding a lot more value, but if it goes sideways, you're actually just making this whole thing much messier, aren't you?

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Gary Arnold: Absolutely, absolutely. And to your point, you're introducing risk to your buyer. An exercise that I run—and now I do this unconsciously in my daily life, but I do this in every business interaction that I have—is recognizing that business is done between people. Yes, I've sold B2B most of my career, but business is done between people, period. The person that you are dealing with at some point during the year is going to be sitting down at a table, either virtually or in person, across from their boss, and they're going to be getting their annual review. There are probably going to be three or four metrics on that piece of paper that they are being evaluated on. When I think about bringing value, creating value through selling, through marketing, through engaging, through moving products, if I can't immediately, in my head, map the value that I'm bringing to one of the metrics that's likely going to be on that person's piece of paper, I know I've got a lot more work to do. Because even if it's the best thing in the world, if it's not what they're being judged on at the end of the year, best case scenario, you're just bringing them more work.

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Mark Drager: In your career, you've worked at Amazon, you've worked at GoDaddy, you've been part of financial institutions, and startups in the payment space, including working at PayPal. You've been at some really large organizations, and you've had very senior roles in some of these companies. So how did you go about getting that face time or deep understanding of the client's needs? If I go back to the growth of my own company when there were eight of us, ten of us, twelve of us, I actually really loved that kind of magic size because I was close enough to the clients to still really deeply understand. They were emailing me and saying, "Mark, I need this. I want that. Can you do this for us?" And I could make the decision whether to add the service or not, or take it on or not, or what have you. When we were at 24 people, and I was just really detached from the day-to-day work, I actually found it much harder to sell. And I'm not with 80 employees or 200 employees or 400 employees. So I can just imagine when you come into, let's use the example of GoDaddy. When you come into GoDaddy, how do you, in your senior director position, come in and be able to say, "Oh, I know what our customers need and want."

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Gary Arnold: You have to prioritize it. You have to make time for it. That's the bottom line. You have to do the work.

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Mark Drager: But what does the work look like? Are you literally going out on calls with your sales team? Are you just calling people up and saying, "Hey, just so you know, I just want to know, why did you pick us? What do you like? What don't you like?" Like, just simple, simple conversations?

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Gary Arnold: All of the above and more. Sitting with the call center teams and listening in on calls, whatever's coming in. Sitting on specific outbound calls where we had campaigns going to hear how the customer reacted to the offer, hear how the customer reacted to the price, to help the sales team in some ways better inquire and do good discovery. But the bottom line, is I want to hear firsthand from the customer what their problems are. It's critical to do that frequently, in different formats, in different ways. But the bottom line, you have to dedicate the time and effort that it takes to engage the customers. You can't get a sense or a picture or a view of what the market looks like and then base all of your forward decisions on that because, by the time you do, the market's going to change.

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Another critical tactic that I always use where I can is if I'm doing direct market research if we're reaching out to prospects to understand a need—we did this at PayPal a lot—rather than teeing up, "Hey, I'm Gary from PayPal, and I want to talk to you about the challenges that you face as a merchant with payments." As soon as you say what business you're in, what company you're with, what products you sell, that merchant, that customer, that person, every preconception that they have about what is and isn't possible through your solution comes into their head. "Oh, payments. It's just a utility. I need it so my people can buy from me." That is so limiting in the context of what a good payment strategy can actually deliver in terms of increased conversion rate, channel growth, net new customer acquisition, and increased average order value. But as soon as you say who you are and what you do, any preconceptions that they have come to the fore.

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Gary Arnold: So what I have always done is I would schedule it through an intermediary. I would start off by talking to the customer, where the prospect or customer with, "We are a services business who does business with companies like yours. Let's start talking about your core and day-to-day challenges that you face in your business." Oftentimes, they'll throw things out that we have no ability to actually impact based on the company that I represented at the time. But typically, pretty quickly you would find something that they do have a need around. It's net new customer acquisition, it's growth, it's channel expansion, whatever, and then beginning to key in from there on what the granularity of those problems are. "Oh, you've got a challenge because you're trying to grow your e-commerce channel, and your conversion rate's bad," or "You're trying to expand geographically, and yet you're not getting the penetration in these new markets that you have in your home market and you were hoping for."

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Now we can start getting more granular through the conversation. I may well divulge that "Okay, well, actually, what we're talking about here is payments and payment type and how that can affect conversion rate because someone's not going to pay with a payment method that they have no idea what it is, and frequently they can't. You have to be landing the right payment in front of the right customer at the right time." Then, perhaps during the conversation, or perhaps not, I'll share what company I'm with. The bottom line is if you start very broad, you get a broad understanding of what their problems are, and the potential impact. If you lead the witness too much, they are going to limit what they tell you. They're going to limit what they talk about because they are going to put every preconception that they have about your solution in front of it.

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Mark Drager: So interesting, because I see the value of both, and I get pushback from some of our clients. If we're doing, let's say, market research or interviews. We did this recently. We did 24 interviews with all of these people, and they knew we were a third party. We were hired to keep the data anonymous so our client didn't know who said what, to help ensure that there was some level of trust and to ensure that we could have honest, hard conversations. And then, you know, we pull a report together, and I spend three hours with our executives as we go through it, and I'm pulling quotes. It's a tough three hours to see what people really think about you, and it's uncomfortable. But often they would say, "Oh, this person used this term. Well, we don't do that. We do so much more than that." Well, I know that you do, but this is how people think of you. See how limited it is. There must be something there. See how they use these terms constantly, and they're confusing you with someone else or something else.

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There must be something there. Like, it's one thing for us not to lead the witness, but I think that there's actually a lot of value in those very reductive perspectives and how people think of you because that truly shows us, at the end of the day, how little people think of us and how little they understand about our industry, and how little value they actually understand. For me, that means, wow, we have a lot of work ahead of us in sharing more stories, educating better, walking people through things, not over-explaining things, but not underestimating how much work it takes to generate a lead, how many touch points you really require, how much hand-holding you really require, how much education is really required. Because if you just focus on those broad problems but ignore those really specific things that you keep hearing time and time again, you miss out on... I don't know if there's like a middle gap, but do you know what I'm saying? Like you miss out on something.

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Gary Arnold: I do, and the duality of the challenge here, and I agree with you, the duality of the challenge here is the fact that as soon as you have said who you are and what business you are from, there's no going back. You can't say, "Oh, well, wait a minute, let's just back off and talk about your high-level business problems." They're not going to go there mentally, right? They're still going to frame it through the conversation that they now know they're having. So you can absolutely get granular around your subject matter, your product line, the problems that it solves, and the way that your customers and prospects in the market think about it. But you only have one chance to start from the other direction and really understand what the customer is thinking about and their business problems. It takes both really what's important here is the ordering.

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Mark Drager: And so you've been a part of organizations that... Okay, so I want to talk a bit about price sensitivity. A lot of times I hear from business owners whose markets have commoditized relationships that they've had. People are leaving or retiring, and a younger generation is coming in, and they just want to look good by squeezing their vendors and partners as much as possible. Inflation is going up. Everyone wants more for less. So price is always a challenge and an issue. And you know, if you're at GoDaddy, if you're at Amazon, if you're at PayPal, you have a brand to help overcome some of these things. But you've also been at startups and you've been a part of organizations that did not have the luxury of brand behind you. And so how would you go about either understanding or managing this? Because you can't interview your way to clients. Every client says, "I want to pay less." So how do we address price sensitivity or commoditization in a market when the brand is not on your side?

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Gary Arnold: There are a number of approaches here. I think first and foremost is starting with a quantification and understanding of the actual value that's delivered because that is not always what you think it is. Back to our earlier conversation, your customer perceives you far differently than you actually believe you are or you perceive yourself. The way that they interpret the value you deliver may be completely different, and people take value for granted very, very quickly. You don't notice electricity until you walk into a room and flip the light switch, and it doesn't go on. That's really big and valuable and important in your life, and yet you never think about it until it's not there. You have to consistently remind the customer of the value that they're getting throughout the entire lifecycle of the relationship.

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There are a number of ways to do that. I've had success in person-to-person contact, where it's viable and cost-effective, things like proven value dashboards, where the customer can see on an ongoing basis, metrics that are indicative of the value that your service or product is delivering to them. But the bottom line, you have to be constantly reminding the customer of the value that they have, and it has to be the actual value as they perceive it, at least to a degree.

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People oftentimes market a service and think of it contextually as simply a service. You miss a tremendous amount of potential value that you can monetize if you're not thinking past that into how it impacts your customer. What is the tangible dollar figure impact of them not doing this or them using an inferior solution? Oftentimes you can get really granular and specific there. If our solution increased your net conversion rate by a quarter of a point, what's that worth to you? Well, if you're the Gap, and you're doing 6 billion a year in E-commerce revenue if I can increase your net conversion rate on your website by a quarter of a point, that's millions of dollars of impact. So don't think about, "I'm marketing a payment solution." Think about, "I am selling you millions of dollars of additional revenue that you wouldn't otherwise get if you didn't go with my solution."

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Mark Drager: I like that. That is such a simple little tweak. You know, we've, in my career, spent a lot of time working with financial institutions, pension plans, and larger corporate clients. If we go back a few years, one of our pension plans we were working with had $500 billion under management, which, that's a lot of assets. But another CEO used to say, that when we would do their annual reporting and all their annual reporting communications for them, they'd always want to break everything down to three digits. So, you know, whatever it might be, $100,250 billion point, 682, and we'd be like, gosh, we're communications people, we're marketing people, we're design people. Do we really have to go to all those digits? And then the CEO would always say, you do know that by the time we get to three digits, it's still tens of millions of dollars or whatever the conversion is, right? Like, For that extra point, 008 is still $80 million, so we really want to communicate those extra numbers.

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Gary Arnold: Yeah, because they're huge, huge numbers.

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Mark Drager: And so if you're listening to this, you might say, well, listen, Mark, I'm not working with pension plans, and I'm not selling to the Gap, and I'm not helping them with their conversions. But what's so great about what you just shared is this idea of being able to tie this very small thing. And I always try to focus on 10 times value. Often we think of 10 times value in terms of returns, either money savings or what have you, but if we can save people time, if we can save people from having to hire additional staff, if we can save people overhead or increase productivity or bring pricing down or drive more revenue, I mean, there are so many different ways that we as an organization can add value. There are specialty fields out there that are so understaffed that if you can help service a client in eight weeks rather than have them take six months, that alone will be worth its weight in gold. If you're in mining and there's downtime on equipment, or if you're in manufacturing and control systems and there's downtime on equipment, every second that's going by is worth something to that organization. And what I hear you saying is, if we could just do a better job of quantifying that for the person we're sitting across from, we can start to show that our small fee relative to the entire organization is a no-brainer.

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Gary Arnold: Absolutely, absolutely. At a former startup, I was with a company called CardTap, we automated sales follow-up to a great degree in the sales enablement stack, a really interesting technology that had been built. I remember one particular client, an insurance company, an insurance broker, sorry, 20 agents, two support staff. The platform, as we deployed it to their 20 reps, automated enough lead follow-up and lead generation that they were able to actually let go of one of their support personnel. Now it was a happy story because that person became an agent, and began selling, but literally somebody who had been almost $100,000 of fully sunk operational costs. That entire person's cost was obviated by about a $20,000 per year engagement with our platform, a five-to-one return. But it was really quantifiable, and they brought it to us. Right? We were selling on increased close rate and other values, particularly, we knew that there were some time savings and efficiency gains, but we hadn't quantified it, and they told us unsolicited, this has automated so much of our sales follow-up that I was able to take one of our support folks and move them out entirely. That's a great value story for them, and it's yet another way that value can be quantified. It's cost savings, it's time savings, it's revenue growth. It's a lot of different paradigms, but you've got to find it and you've got to quantify it.

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Mark Drager: So I've been speaking with Gary Arnold, and he is a growth leader, a value creator, and the lead of a company called Execute, which is a mastermind for business owners. You can learn more about that, all of Gary's details will be in the show notes. But Gary, I do have one last question for you before we wrap up, and it's a question I love to end every conversation with because I feel like it just boils everything down to a fine point. So if you had to give us one tip, one strategy to help us sell more, what would that be?

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Gary Arnold: Engage your customers. Engage your prospects. Expect nothing in return. Find the value there for both of you and never be bashful about the fact that your time has value as well. Search for value until you discover it, or until you discover it's not there, and then move on, because you've got more valuable things to do with your time.

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Resources & Go Deeper

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Crafting A Customer-Centric Innovation Strategy - Forbes

‍This article discusses practical steps for implementing a customer-centric innovation strategy. It introduces a mental model that shifts the focus from merely creating superior products to enabling customers to achieve their desired outcomes. The piece emphasizes the importance of tailoring interactions based on customer needs and building trust through a holistic approach.

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Why Customer Centricity Is A Key To Long-Term Success - Forbes‍

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This article outlines the significance of placing customers at the center of all business operations. It highlights the benefits of a customer-centric approach, including increased revenue, market share, and customer loyalty. The piece also provides actionable steps for organizations to align their mission and values with customer needs.
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What Is Customer Centricity? - Forbes
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This article defines customer centricity and discusses how organizations can build a culture that prioritizes understanding customer situations and expectations. It emphasizes the importance of anticipating customer needs and fostering long-term relationships rather than focusing solely on transactions.
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Are We Still In The Era Of Customer Centricity? - Forbes

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This article examines the evolving landscape of customer-centric strategies, highlighting how consumers now play a significant role in influencing product development and strategic direction. It discusses examples like LEGO Ideas, where consumer input is actively sought and integrated into business strategies.
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The Value of Customer Experience, Quantified - MIT Sloan Management Review

This piece quantifies the impact of customer experience on revenue growth and profitability, providing insights into how companies can enhance their interactions with customers to drive business success. It underscores the importance of aligning business strategies with customer experiences for sustained growth.
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