Think Like Your Customers

Ever wonder what makes a sale truly successful?

Mark Drager dives deep into the heart of selling in this episode. He believes it's more than just product knowledge; it's about truly understanding your customer.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• How empathy can transform your sales game.
• Why the buyer's unique experience is the real key.
• The power of adaptable sales strategies.

These insights are game-changers for anyone in sales.

The world of business is evolving. Customers now seek genuine connections and trust. Listen in to find out why understanding your customer is the secret weapon every sales and marketing pro needs.

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Links to This Episode

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• YouTube
• Audible

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Key Takeaways

• Understanding the Customer's Perspective is Vital - Mark emphasizes the importance of truly understanding where customers are coming from. This involves more than just listening; it requires genuinely feeling and recognizing the customer's pain points and motivations.
• The Buyer's Experience Shapes Decision-Making - Recognizing the barriers or hesitations a customer might have allows sellers to preemptively address them, paving the way for a smoother sales journey.
• Adapting Sales Strategies According to the Customer - Instead of hard selling, guiding the customer through their pain points and providing value through education can lead to more genuine and lasting sales relationships.

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Deep Dive into Customer-Centric Sales: This episode offers invaluable insights into the importance of placing customers at the heart of your sales approach.

Understanding Emotional Triggers: Learn how to tap into the emotional aspects of the buying process, which often play a significant role in purchasing decisions.

Building Trust: Discover techniques to establish and maintain trust with potential customers, a key factor in long-term sales success.

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More About our Host, Mark Drager

AKA the Badass Brand Architect, 5th Generation Entrepreneur, Host of The How To Sell More Podcast

When he's not podcasting, Mark's the Co-Founder & CEO of SalesLoop. He's a dedicated husband to his high school sweetheart, Jacqueline, and a proud father of four.

Mark didn't follow the typical route to becoming a sales & marketing expert. A connected figure in the entrepreneur community, Mark provides listeners with a unique mix of wit, insight, and straightforward advice.

Some of Mark's unconventional adventures include commandeering a Boeing 737-800 for a day, facing harsh criticism from a billionaire, and shedding 70 lbs in his late 30s. Though he never attended college, Mark stands as proof of the might of maintaining a student mindset and being ever-ready to seek assistance.

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A Transcription of The Talk

So every few weeks, I go to my local library, I take my kids there, and they pick out some books. While they're running around and picking out the books that they want, I always head over to the business section or the personal development section just to see what's on the shelves. I like going to my local bookstores, but mostly I order things from Audible. I listen to books, or I buy them from Amazon. That's a pretty big commitment. So the library is a lot of fun because I can literally pick up anything. It's totally free, super, super low bar. If it's not good, I just ignore it. It's not a big deal.

But a few months ago, I was getting ready to go to Jamaica with my family. We're going on our first family trip since COVID. I picked up this book off the shelf, "Think Like Your Customer" by Bill Stinnett. Now, this book was written like 15 or 20 years ago. It doesn't look really that new, it doesn't look that great. But for whatever reason, I picked it up, and I started flipping through it. I took it with me on this trip. Now I'm sitting at the beach, sipping my cocktails, and the family is running around in the sun. I pick up the book, and I start to flip through it.

And let me tell you, some of the lessons in this book, "Think like your customer," are so powerful. The number one lesson, the number one takeaway I had from this book was it's more important for us to focus on our customer's buying journey than it is for us to solely focus on the selling process. There are six key questions that every salesperson, every business, every business development person needs to be able to answer to ensure that we are removing the risk, we are removing the pain, we are removing the discomfort, we are qualifying the leads that we're speaking to. There are six questions that must be answered. And when I started asking myself these six questions about my business sales loop, or when I started thinking about how we could apply this in the brand strategy process that we help our clients work through, we saw massive unlocks. So, I want to share with you the key takeaways from the book "Think like your customer" by Bill Stinnett because these are powerful tools. And once you understand the power behind them and you start to roll them into your own selling process, I think you're going to see transformative change.

Let's break down the first principle. It's not enough for customers to have a need because needs go unfulfilled every day. Often when we're thinking about our products and our services as business owners, we're thinking about the fact that there's so many people out there, there's such a huge market, right? So many people need our products, so many people need our service. This is amazing. I'm going to go ahead and take it to market. And then we wonder why we get crickets, we wonder why no one cares, we wonder why campaigns don't work, or we don't see ROI, or we're not closing, or people aren't willing to pay what we think they need to pay. And the truth is that it's not enough just for people or customers to have a need. Needs go unfulfilled every single day. And the best way to visualize this is to think about health, think about fitness, right? Every single one of us has a certain need when it comes to our health and fitness. Maybe you want to build more strength, maybe you want to move, maybe your joints hurt, maybe you're getting older, maybe you want to lose weight, maybe you want to feel more confident, maybe you have other underlying health conditions. All of us have a need. But does that mean that every single person goes out there and signs up for the health class or goes to the gym or gets the blood work done or whatever it might be? No, of course not. And so we need to recognize that even though we are super passionate and we believe in our product and our service and what it is that we do, and we know that there are people out there who have a need for us, for our product, and for our service, it doesn't mean that they are going to act on it.

The second principle is also true: people buy what they want to get the results they want. And so, this is a little bit painful. For me, it's maybe a little bit painful for you to hear. But here's the real underlying truth: what you do does not matter, how you do it does not matter, why you do it does not matter, unless it already matters to your customer. Or you can do a really good job of tying back what you do to the results they want. And this takes us to the next point: nobody wants what you sell. Sorry, sorry, I got loud there in your ears. Nobody wants what you sell. What they want is results using what you sell to get closer to their goals. And the faster that we embrace this, the more objective we can be about this. Ah, so much easier. That's all the first part of this. We have to embrace all of those pieces. But there's a second part to this. We often think that we have an amazing service, an amazing product. We know that it'll help people, it'll give them results. We know that we're better than our competition. We know we are the clear choice. Why won't people pick us? Why won't they move forward? Why won't people say yes? Well, here's the next thing: there will always be more opportunities for our prospects and our customers and even ourselves, than there is time or money to invest in. And this is best demonstrated when you go to a conference. Think of the last conference you went to, think of the last time you connected or went on social media or went on YouTube to learn about how you should be marketing, how you should be advertising, how you should be selling. People are like, "Oh, man, it's 2023. It's 2024. You need to be doing blogging, you need to be doing podcasts, you need to be on Facebook, you need to be on Tik Tok, you need to embrace AI, you need to do email campaigns, you need this CRM, you need that software. There's just way too much."

And so, think about it. If you're in a B2B business, especially often you are approaching the customer because they have a need, you understand the results, right? Like all these things we've talked about. But we're like, "I don't understand why we're not moving forward with this." Well, frankly, we're all just too busy, right? Like the status quo is often easier than it is to invest more time and more money and more human capital and more focus and more energy.

When I had to move my company over from one internal software to another, like project management software, we moved from an internal JIRA Software to Asana. And it took us like six months to assess, it took like a year to move over the team and be able to get back up to the level of efficiency we had on the previous software. And I'm glad we did it. But then tons of people would come along and be like, "We're even better, we're even better, we're even better." And it's like I don't have the time or the money or the resources to go through another transition right now. Like I don't care that you're marginally better. It doesn't matter that your software is marginally better. It's going to take too much out of my business to make another big move.

So we have to understand that there's always going to be more opportunities out there. We're always competing against all these other opportunities for people. And so ultimately, it's never a question of whether buying your product or investing in your results or your tactics or strategies, or whatever it is you sell. It's never a question of whether it's a good decision or a bad decision. It's always a question of whether this is a better or worse decision than directing those resources elsewhere.

Never good or bad. It's never right or wrong. It's a question of whether this is the best use of my time and money. And now I'm going to get real quick to the six questions that we have to answer now that we've really established some of the key learnings and the key takeaways and the foundational principles that Bill Stinnett articulates so well in his book, "Think like your customer." Let's get into the real this. This was mind-blowing to me, okay. When we think about our customer's buying journey, as opposed to our selling process, our selling process is the steps that we want them to move through, from the moment that they discover us to the moment of close and hopefully onboarding, and then referrals and then repeat business or what have you. But, if we think about our selling process, our selling processes, everything that we're pushing out, but the customer's buying process starts long before they ever find us, and will continue long after they stop working with us. And their buying process is very different. Often, people buy through disqualification. We tend to sell through a way of where we always want to be the first choice, we always want to be on the top. And we want to keep people moving through our process. But people buy through disqualification because there's just too many options.

And that's the way that people work. Everyone is looking for a reason to disqualify someone; they are typically not looking for the reason to pick someone. Because it's easier to nitpick these little things and disqualify people than it is to, out of a group of, let's say, five candidates, five companies, five solutions that are all good but different because you can't compare apples to apples or oranges to oranges or what have you. They're all slightly different. It's really hard for people to be able to figure out what the best solution is, and it tends to get overwhelming. So they're just looking for reasons to disqualify people.

And so there are six questions we need to ask when we think about people's buying process, our customer's buying process. It would help if you visualize this, imagine that I'm writing on a whiteboard right now. And I put on the left side a big giant A.

And on the right side, I put up a big giant C, A is on the left, C is on the right, and in the middle is going to be B. A, B, C, people start at A, and they want to move to C. And the way they're going to do that is with the middle step B. That's what you offer. The right starting point A, ending goal C. The middle step is B, A, B, C. So imagine that now, the B is the missing piece, the B is what you offer them. But for them to move from A to C and go through that step of B, there are a bunch of risks or a bunch of fears, there are a bunch of unknowns.

Here are the six questions that are going to help us move our customers and our prospects from A to C and realize that we are the solution, and to be able to help them with this transition.

Question number one, what are their motivations for leaving A and moving to C if we can understand? What's their motivation? What's motivating them? And if they don't have really strong motives, well, this might be a bit hard. And this is where we can come in now and help shape and educate their motives and work with them to be able to determine what their key motives are.

The next question, what is the urgency driving them to arrive at C? Often people don't move forward swiftly, they don't move forward with you, they don't move forward because there's no urgency built into the sales process. And so just by asking the question, okay, you are at A and you need to move to C, but what is the urgency that's driving you to get to C? Why do you have to do this? And again, if there's no urgency there, through conversation, we have the opportunity to introduce urgency, build urgency, or confirm that. And frankly, if there's no urgency, and there never will be and there's no motivation, they never will be? Not a great prospect to speak to.

Third question, what is the payback? Or the returns? And these returns don't have to be monetary. But what is the payback? Or returns they expect when they reach C? So they're at A, they're gonna invest in B with you to get to C, but what's the payback or the ROI when they hit C? What do they imagine that to be?

Fourth question, what are the consequences for staying at A? Often people think making a decision is a risk. People often do not realize that failing to make a decision, doing nothing is also a risk. And so we need to be able to understand and help build up in our prospect's mind what the consequences are for staying at A and not moving through B, through you, and not arriving at C.

Question number five, what are the resources or means that are available to make this trip to C? What resources are you going to put forward? This can be people-focused, money, other partners, vendors, investments, time, but what resources are you putting forward? What resources are you making available to make the trip to C? Because before we ever get to the quoting or the scoping process or the selling process or anything else, if the prospect comes back and says, "Well, we believe that this is going to take three months of our time and $100,000, and we're willing to put Sally in on this." And you're like, "Three months? This is like an 18-month commitment. Sally, sorry, Sally, but you're not senior leadership, and 100 grand? Wow, I don't even think we need that much money. We need more leadership, we need more time, but not necessarily more money."

This will help give you a sense of what they're thinking and how you can educate them to right-size those resources. And now the sixth question, what are their perceived risks to leave A, move to C? Now, what are the risks? What are their perceived risks from leaving A and moving to C? Now, if we can understand these six questions: What are their motivations for leaving A and moving to C? What's the urgency driving them to arrive at C? What is the payback or ROI they expect when they reach C? What are the consequences for staying at A? What are the resources or means available to make the trip to C? And what are the perceived risks to leave A and move to C? Once you have those questions answered, or you see the holes in their logic, you are in a much stronger position to educate, to inform, to help shape the solution, and ultimately to qualify whether this prospect is worth your investment of time, energy, and money.

Now, the last key takeaway from the book "Think like your customer," and this one hurt me a little bit, or my heart when I read it. And it's ultimately that if a customer can move from A to C without you, they will. If they can move from A to C in a way that's cheaper, faster, lower risk, with more urgency, with someone that they just liked better, whatever it is, if for whatever reason, I spoke earlier about the fact that people move through a disqualification process as opposed to a qualification process. If your prospect, if your customer can get from A to C without you, they will drop you in a second.

And with that, let's move into the three-point Roundup.

Number one: It's not so much about your selling process until you really understand your customer's buying process. And I think these questions and these points help illustrate the importance of understanding how your buyers choose to qualify or, should I say, disqualify you. 

Number two: It's not enough to have a need, right? Needs go unfulfilled every day. People buy what they want to get the results they want. And so you better do a good job of tying back what it is you do and how you do it and why you do it back to the results that they want.

And number three: Customers are always looking for a reason to spend less money, to spend less time, or to make something happen with less of their energy and focus and resources on it. So ultimately, if a customer can ever get what they want without you, they will do that. They will drop you.