Recently we sat down with a legendary sales trainer in the IT / Managed Services space: Jennifer Bleam. We originally intended for this to be a podcast but someone … me … didn’t get all the fiddly technical bits right and forgot to record Jennifer’s microphone output. The only sound from Jennifer came through our microphones from our speakers, and the volume is just too faint to hear without having to have superhuman levels of attention.
But the information that Jennifer shared in this interview was so good, we knew we had to go through it painstakingly by hand to capture every word, every nuance and meaning of the amazing thoughts and ideas Jennifer has.
She gave us a masterclass on Sales and selling managed IT services today … and she even spilled some marketing secrets and outlined what real, profitable marketing looks like.
I know in this format a podcast makes for a long article. But I promise you, if you read this article you will come away with at least three profitable ideas that can shift your sales and marketing and make such an impact it will completely transform your business. From slow and lifeless, to energetic and thriving.
To give you the most value, we have linked to some of the golden ideas and insights Jennifer shared. These are the major, transformational ideas in just the first half of the recording. There are others, many others woven into her words that are equally astounding. If, as you read this, you ask yourself, “what has to exist in order for what she is saying to be true,” you will uncover long-held sales secrets and absorb the mindset of a true sales champion. Your life, sales and business can only change for the better as a result.
- Why selling ingredients is keeping you in a stagnant cycle – and why you have to switch to selling the cheesecake immediately
- How to motivate people to buy
- Why selling based on productivity gains is nice, but isn’t powerful enough to cause a prospect to buy from you today
- How fast we can actually adapt and why it is the secret to long-term success
- Why, if you want to achieve success, you have to step outside your comfort zone
- How to handle buyers with no budgets and get them to come to you pre-sold begging you to sell to them
- Marketing ideas that move the needle and use the emotions the prospect is experiencing to position you, your business and your solution as the obvious choice
- The balloon metaphor and how this simple sales thought can increase your close rate overnight , have customers thanking you for selling to them, increase their satisfaction with your services and increase their lifetime value to your business
Remember, these are just the golden nuggets in the first half of this article. You have to read the rest to get them all… but it’s going to be well worth your time.
*** Connect with Jennifer and download her freebies – links at the end of this post.
Shelly Miller
Welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing podcast, your source for B2B Building Information, where we talk sales and marketing, and give managed service providers and IT service companies, the insider secrets you need to know to grow your business. We want to help you attract leads and sales and show you how to align sales and marketing. So you get more sales faster with less cost. I’m Shelly and he’s Mike. What are we going to talk about today, Mike?
Mike Miller
Well, today on the show, we have a very special guest. A legend in the industry, the Cybersecurity Sherpa herself, Jennifer Bleam. If you’re ready to leave basecamp and reach the pinnacle of success with your MSP, there’s no better guide than Jennifer Bleam. Jennifer, welcome to the Mindwhirl Marketing Podcast.
Shelly Miller
Welcome!
Jennifer Bleam
Thank you so much.
Mike Miller
Oh, yeah, absolutely. We’re so excited that you’re on the show.
Shelly Miller
We are!
Jennifer Bleam
I woke up this morning and knew this would be the highlight of my day.
Shelly Miller
We feel the same!
Mike Miller
Exactly. Well, I can’t wait to hear your take on sales, and how MSPs can grow their business and really reach that pinnacle that you help guide them to. So, the first question I wanted to ask you was, you know, salespeople, technology sales professionals, they have a standard process that they go through. But yours is a little different, right? Do you mind explaining what your process is?
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, so I’m a little bit a little bit contrarian in the way that I approach the whole sales concept, but a lot of people will essentially break down what they’re offering, and they talk about all the different technology pieces. And I like to say that’s like giving the ingredients of a cheesecake. And nobody wants to buy ingredients if they want to buy a cheesecake. And most people that follow me know I have three boys, boys are always hungry, and they like to say to me, Mom, there’s no food in the house, and I’m like, there is plenty of food in the house the pantry doors can hardly close. The freezer is packed.
There’s plenty of food in the house. And one of my sons said a couple weeks ago, well there’s plenty of ingredients. But there’s no meals, there’s no food. And I thought, you know, that’s what the prospects want too. They don’t want the ingredients. They don’t want the secret sauce, I mean, that certainly needs to be there, right? There has to be a secret sauce, there has to be this thing that you’re delivering – Managed Services, Managed Security, Co-Managed IT – that is what you’re delivering. But your prospects don’t really care about the ingredients, they care about the cheesecake. Or, really, the end result … that happy place, that euphoria that you’re going to lead them to … out of the horrible place they are in now and into the promised land.
And so that’s why I’m a little bit contrarian. In your head you have to break down what it is that you’re delivering. But when you’re when you’re on that sales call, they don’t care if you have an RMM Tool and Advanced Antivirus and, and, and … the list goes on. What they care about is how it’s going to benefit them. What’s in it for me. It’s like a marketing question we all have echoing in our mind … “what’s in it for me?” Well, that doesn’t stop when you take off the marketing hat and walk into the sales world. Everything you do in Sales means you are answering that question, “what’s in it for me,” from the mind of the prospect. It always has to be set in the world the prospect lives in, not your world as the technician or the owner or the quasi geek, if you will. So that’s a that’s an important shift that’s difficult for a lot of people.
Shelly Miller
I agree.
Mike Miller
Yeah, absolutely. So, there’s … you know … two ways to motivate people: either towards something or away from something. So, do you think that away from works better than towards?
Jennifer Bleam
Yes, it’s funny, inside the book, Secrets of Question Based Selling by Thomas Freese, he talks about gold medals and German Shepherds. And German Shepherds stand for that fear, uncertainty and doubt like, okay, the German Shepherd is nipping at your heels and let’s run away from that. Let’s take you away from that bad and into the good. And the gold medal is the good. And so many people that I talk to, they don’t want to talk about the fear, uncertainty and doubt, they don’t want to talk about the German Shepherd.
I use the analogy Bobcat; they don’t want to talk about the bobcat. They just want to talk about the unicorns and the fairies and the rainbows and the sprinkles of colorful wonderfulness and I understand that from a personality perspective – a psychology perspective… but candidly, what works better? If you look at the stats, and you look at the psychology: looking at what the risks are and looking at the scariness and the fear, uncertainty, and doubt – that is what’s going to motivate someone to move. And yes, of course here’s the euphoria, there’s the fantasticness that you’re going to deliver. But what really motivates them are the German Shepherds. And I didn’t write that rule I noted it. Don’t shoot the messenger. But I think we all do that. We don’t lose weight, because we’ll be fit. We lose weight because we want to be around for our kids.
It really is that German Shepherd nipping at our heels that causes us to make almost every decision. And so, unfortunately, I have people ask, do you teach based on fear, uncertainty and doubt? Well, to some extent I do. Because that’s, especially with cybersecurity. That’s the conversation. It’s about risk. What’s it going to mean to your company if this cyber incident or ransomware, or criminal activity in your network. What happens to your company if that worst case scenario comes true? Well, that isn’t unicorns and fairies. It’s a very real threat and we have to bring that up. If we don’t bring that up, we’ll be doing a disservice to our clients, our prospects.
Mike Miller
Yeah, I agree. I’ve noticed that MSPs want to sell on productivity gains.
Jennifer Bleam
Yes. I think that used to work. It wasn’t necessarily a bad move six years ago, and there were plenty of people that could actually document, you know, I’ve got a colleague that has a whole system inside of the law, and he only specializes in lawyers, and he can show productivity gains. But is that really the differentiator today, and is that enough? Because sometimes cyber security solutions can cost efficiency, right – you got to reset your password, or you have to find your phone to do 2FA … for me, my phone’s usually in airplane mode and sometimes in a different room so I have to get up and go get my phone … and those things are very necessary, but they cost in terms of productivity.
And so, it’s just like anything in business, we go through cycles, and we go through shifts, and if you’re selling today like you were selling five or six years ago, you probably are falling behind. Just like you would probably say to your clients, if you haven’t changed anything about your infrastructure, or your security posture, or the way that you do business in five years, you’re falling behind, you’re falling behind your competitors, you’re falling behind threat actors. So, you have to always be iterating change. It would be nice to just sit back and say, I’m just gonna keep selling the way I’ve always sold. But that’s not the reality.
Especially in this time, and the time of this recording. We are hopefully at the end of a pandemic. It might be a bit too soon to call, but I’m hopeful. As I talked to MSPs, we were all forced overnight to say I can’t go on site and do a network audit. Last week, I would have said it was a mandatory as part of my sales process. But, I still want to make sales. How do I make those sales without the network audit? Or how do I do a network audit if I can’t go on site? Or how can I cobble together something that loosely resembles a network audit when no one’s allowed to go out of their house?
So, change was forced upon us. And we were then able to realize there’s these paradigms that have just been accepted, truisms in our in our industry, that you can’t make a sale without doing x. You have to go on site, you have to go on site one, two, three times depending upon who you listen to. And now all of a sudden MSPs are making sales without network audits and without going face to face … they are doing Zoom calls. And I love that because it makes me think what else can we challenge? Where else is there room for considerable iteration, improvement and efficiency? Because let’s face it, a two or three sales call sales cycle with a 50% close rate is not efficient. It’s crazy inefficient. So, I love that those kinds of paradigms are being challenged. If nothing else, that’s one of the gifts of Coronavirus I think it has literally forced us to come face to face with things we just accepted as true, that weren’t.
Shelly Miller
I completely agree. It’s very interesting. To go back to your point about you can’t sell and market the same way we did five years ago, it’s the same with every aspect of your business. You can’t market the same way you did five years ago. The pandemic forced us to rethink how we do all things. And it made us more efficient at how we work.
Mike Miller
Yes, to work from home. It was on its way; it just was hastened.
Jennifer Bleam
In a large way. And from what I see, that trend is not likely to change anytime soon. Robert Herjavec said he’s planning to decommission quite a bit of real estate … I was looking at a Forbes article a month or so ago, and it discussed how a decent percentage of executives who said that some percentage of their workforce will always work from home. What a flip from “0% of my people can work from home. It’s not efficient. And how? There’s too many questions.”
We were forced to solve all of the questions effective immediately. And they figured it out. Right? Because we’re smart people, we pivot, right? That word “pivot” has been used much more than it was a year or two ago. We’re good at that. That’s what we are as business owners, we are problem solvers. And so we were given what seemed like a massive problem. And inside of a week, most people had acclimated, like, the biggest problem was, we can’t find a camera or a monitor. Well, that’s not a business ending challenge by any stretch, and then it was just like, okay, I work from home now. It’s different, but it’s no big deal. And we made that switch very, very quickly. So that makes me wonder what switches can be made, that have never been thought about.
Shelly Miller
Yes, it gave us all the perfect kick in the butt to get things done quickly. So again, another gift from the pandemic, and a push to change. Because it’s easy to get comfortable with the things that you’re already doing. It turned out to be a nice push.
Jennifer Bleam
And all growth comes from discomfort, right? We all get in our nice little warm security blankets. We keep doing things the way we’ve always done them. And I have standard operating procedures, and everything just works really well. But growth happens outside the comfort zone, which I think is why growth doesn’t happen for so many companies. It forces you to become uncomfortable. It forces you to say I’m gonna try this new thing which, I have 633 questions and there’s probably another 1000 questions that I don’t even know what I should be asking, because I’m not in the trenches yet. But I’m going to make the leap, and I’m going to make it happen. But too many people are like, well I’m really comfortable here. I want to stay cozy under my blanket. So that sense of I have to step outside my comfort zone if I want to grow … it’s not talked about a whole lot inside of the space.
Mike Miller
Yes, that’s true. And you know, so what’s comfortable for MSPs is referrals.
And so the sales kind of takes a backseat, as in, I’ll get to it someday. Which is not the right thing to do. You have to have a consistent sales program. But one of the things that MSPs are struggling with is they either have clients who already have an IT Services Provider, or an MSP helping them or they have someone who is new who doesn’t have an MSP working with them, and they don’t have a budget. So how do you handle that? What would you advise?
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, so let’s talk about the second one first, so you don’t have a budget? So technically, they wouldn’t qualify for a sales call. But I would say that is very much for a nurture campaign, a drip campaign. If, let’s say that they have the requisite number of seats, whatever your benchmark is, 10 computers, 20 computers, wherever you placed your benchmark, so they qualify in terms of number of computers, they just haven’t budgeted in the past. Maybe they’ve never had IT Support or maybe they’ve only done break fix, or perhaps they just have no clue what it costs. Or maybe they’ve always had an uncle, a friend, a neighbor … sometimes it’s the owner himself or herself. It’s like well, I kind of know computers. So, there’s never been a cash flow that’s actually been outlaid.
And so for those companies, I would say they definitely need to be on your nurture sequence. So I would recommend a weekly email, or perhaps a newsletter every month. I’m a big believer in people who run webinars and seminars. And so those people should be added to that list so that you are continuing to nurture them continually create a relationship with them. If social media is something that you focus on, make sure that they’re on your social media channels so that they see your content.
And then, if that is a large objection that you keep running into frequently, which is I don’t have an IT budget, I would recommend creating some resources around that, whether it’s a blog post, or it’s a five- or ten-minute Facebook Live, maybe a calculator on your website, what should the average company be spending on IT? What should the average company be spending on cybersecurity? What you’re starting to do is, overcome that sales objection before it’s really a sales objection. And you’re letting them know, hey, this is something you need to be thinking about as you are growing and you’re expanding. This is an expense you’ve probably never had before, and never thought about before. But you need to be thinking about it. I would also go the extra step to say, you know, we do run into this a lot. “I’m completely just spit balling, but we run into this a lot, what we usually find is that at the time that you’re creating next year’s budget, that’s a really good time to have this conversation.”
Would you like me to come back in then and do a quick 30-minute-deep dive on “how to create your IT budget”, well, then I would hope that if you were invited back in six months or nine months, that you’re going to create a budget that happens to allow for your plan to be purchased. And so what you’re doing is you’re building that know, like and trust, right? Everybody talks about know, like and trust. I actually had someone comment on a Facebook post of mine, that oh, know, like and trust is so 1995. I got just a little snarky. I replied and said, oh, well, you know, it’s worked pretty well for me and it tends to work for my clients. But if you have another idea that isn’t know, like and trust, I’d be happy to look at your metrics.
Then I added or is metrics, too 1995? Know, like and trust may be an old-fashioned concept, but it’s the way all of us buy.
Let’s say I’m a woman, I’m walking into a car dealership, let’s assume they give me the time of day, which is probably a big assumption. If I see a salesperson that is actually friendly and cordial and asks me what I want lets me finish my sentences versus a salesperson at the same type of dealership who’s rude and obnoxious and won’t look me in the eye. We all know who’s getting the sale.
Know, like and trust is something that should always be used.
Shelly Miller
I agree. It never goes out of style.
Mike Miller
It’s universal.
Jennifer Bleam
We’ll be using it for years to come, unless we all become robots or something – know, like and trust has to be a factor in your marketing and sales strategy.
Mike Miller
Absolutely. It’s only worked since the dawn of time.
Jennifer Bleam
Yes. Why in the world would I try to reinvent that? It totally works.
Shelly Miller
And if you’re still not sure that it works understand they try to train AI to be liked and trusted. They selected that human trait, to train AI. And using know, like and trust has never failed, just like you said.
Mike Miller
So you had mentioned several really like masterclass items of things that MSPs could do to get attention and to start getting the client on board with realizing that they need to budget for this expense. And, a lot of things that you said, are really great. Do you have any other marketing ideas, tips or tactics as far as articles and stuff like that?
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, well, definitely articles, right. So as you are starting to curate your content as you’re creating this relationship with someone. I love the idea that you said, what if someone says they don’t have enough money or if that is coming up a lot, then that becomes almost an avatar. Then hold that picture of that person, and perhaps you name them, like Timothy. Name the avatar Timothy. So Timothy is the ideal client in terms of size, in terms of mindset, in terms of personality, culture, etc. But Timothy doesn’t have a budget. So how can you overcome that? Well, you start to write articles that talk about how much should I budget, you write articles that talk about, I didn’t use to budget, and now what do I do. Or you find testimonials from your existing clients, like, hey, when I found XYZ, MSP in my area, I had never spent so much on IT support before I was a little “feeling,” whatever that feeling is. I was a little concerned, I was a little scared, I was a little skeptical, I was a little whatever. But now that I’ve actually been spending the money every single month for two years, I’m realizing it helps with productivity, it helps me sleep at night. I know my data is backed up.
So those stories, those newsletter articles, stories from successful case studies with clients, interviewing them on Facebook lives, or LinkedIn lives. And again, if social media is a strategy that you’re pursuing, then use all of those media. The reason I like newsletters, and stories so much is stories are very, very powerful from a psychology standpoint. When you hear a story, your brain drops the trust hormone. And I suspect it’s because most of us grew up next to mommy when we were two years old, and she told us or read us stories. And so we naturally associate stories with trust. So don’t manipulate that, but realize that when you are telling a story, people naturally trust it. Because I can say, oh, I’m the best sales trainer in the world, but you’re naturally going to be skeptical of me. And rightly so because we’ve all been burned.
We’ve all had life experience that says when someone says they are great, they might not be so great. But when I tell you a story, that a client, said to me, you know, I never used to have confidence, but then I trained with you. And now I have so much confidence and I’m making more sales, and I’m making more money, you can’t argue with that story. It’s their story. It’s their life. That’s what they lived through.
And so yes, there’s so much wrapped up in stories, I actually want to do a whole training on how to tell stories, why are stories so effective? How do you curate the stories? I think especially as a company’s grow, it’s so important to have a mechanism in place that your whole team knows, what is it that I’m listening for, so they can capture those stories. Because most of the people listening to this, have a larger team and so it’s not just up to the owner anymore to capture these stories. We have technicians. We have dispatchers, we have service managers, we have people in the front office, and they need to tune in. So when someone says, oh, that was so great, you guys were able to recover my data. I can’t imagine what would have happened if I couldn’t get that proposal back. Well, those are nuggets that are a story.
A team needs a process by which they say, “man, that’s a great story! I’d love to meet … do you have five or ten minutes right now or can we carve some time out tomorrow? I’d like to learn more about what is going on in your head” … and you get those feelings like ” I couldn’t believe it when I went to open my Word document and it wouldn’t open, I was panicked!” “This was a big deal, and I had a deadline and my boss was breathing down my neck.” You get those stories out while they’re fresh in the person’s mind. And they become testimonials for your websites, they become case studies for your newsletter, you can highlight them on social media. You know, that one marketing asset becomes very powerful and you can use it in your sales, in your marketing, everywhere. And it’s super powerful.
Mike Miller
Yes, it is.
Shelly Miller
Oh, and if you ever have that class, that would be great. We’ve been helping people with recording their sales calls so they can listen to those nuggets and remember them, so they need to add those emotional nuggets to your CRM. Because as you mentioned they can be used over and over again.
Jennifer Bleam
That would be a really fun master class that we might be able to team up on.
Mike Miller
Yes, it would. Because then, I hate the term, but it can become part of your “tribal knowledge” of your business.
Jennifer Bleam
Yes, or your company’s cheesecake recipe.
Shelly Miller
There you go, exactly. You are making me hungry with cheesecake.
Jennifer Bleam
I know, I know. I’m a little hungry so I’ll stop with my analogies.
Shelly Miller
I love it.
Mike Miller
I wanted to point out two things. First, when you’re doing stories, metaphors are extremely helpful. So humans pay attention to metaphors, stories and pictures of humans. So this is what marketers use, right? That’s like the major weapons of marketers. And if you go back, like we’ve studied old school copywriters, they never use statements like, limited time offer or you only have five minutes to get this or else you lose everything. What they did was they told stories.
Like David Ogilvy’s famous Rolls Royce ad said, “at 55 miles an hour, the only sound you’ll hear is the ticking of the clock.”
Jennifer Bleam
Yes.
Mike Miller
It’s all story based.
Jennifer Bleam
And it creates a picture in your mind which your mind can grasp and relate too.
I was telling a private client this morning; we were talking about your discovery. And I said, you know, the tendency is to uncover some pain, uncover some frustration, uncover the fact that okay, yes, your employees are clicking on links, and here’s what could happen. So the tendency of most salespeople is to say, there there, it’s going to be okay, I’m going to ride in like a white knight and I’m going to resolve this for you. And I totally used an analogy, I said you need to look at Discovery like you’re blowing up a balloon. And when you get the balloon, large enough and tight enough and its right on the verge of popping like that, that’s hopefully the end of your sales call. If you get people to where they are just feeling uncomfortable, they’re just feeling stretched, and they’re thinking I never really thought about that before. And you’re like, yeah, this happens to a lot of companies. It’s gonna be okay. You just deflated the balloon; you just took all the emotion out of the sale.
Shelly Miller
Great point.
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, you’re doing them a disservice. Because what you meant in your head is, “when you partner with me, I’m going to solve it.” But if you take the stress out of the sales call, and they didn’t hear the “when you partner with me” part because you probably didn’t say that, because it’s a little awkward in a sales conversation. But you just took all the emotion out, you just completely took away the emotion. That growling shepherd is not nipping at their heels anymore. So they are like, oh, I’m good.
Shelly Miller
The balloon was deflated! That’s a great analogy.
Mike Miller
So for everybody taking notes, that is an advanced topic. Because humans, they have problems in their minds. And once they shift it in their mind, they don’t have it anymore. This is why people buy books and don’t read them. Because now I got the book, I got the information, I don’t need to actually read it. So that is a huge point.
Jennifer Bleam
I don’t love to make gender generalities. But I think women especially want to solve, we want people to feel comfortable around us. We want them to not feel stress. And candidly, it’s that stress that is going to force them to realize that they need to change.
It definitely is a bit of a more advanced topic, when you’re talking about analogy. That’s a perfect segway there.
Shelly Miller
You have to retrain your brain when you’re selling. You have to put your brain into sales mode. I tell people to think back to the last items they bought, and what made them buy? So instead of looking at it as though you are scaring someone into something, think about the emotions you had when you bought, and you’ll realize it works on you really well.
Mike Miller
Yeah, there’s frames for everything and you can take the negative frame, but really, in order to serve, you need ensure that you are getting the message across and helping them to understand the value. And, this brings up a good question, because really, we’re getting into closing, and I’m sure MSPs with a sales rep, or maybe a couple sales reps are doing outbound telemarketing / sales development rep activities, and it’s the owner of the business who’s closing. Most of the owners are kind of timid, as far as closing or actually building that desire and agitating the problem, they’re kind of gun shy on that. Any suggestions for them?
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, I’ve got so much, we could do a podcast on just that topic.
But a couple of things, I’m going to talk about closing first. So this is another area where, I differ a little bit from some of the traditional sales trainers. So I am Sandler trained and have been through the Sandler process. They walk you through this submarine. They talk about how you get through this submarine, the first compartment in the submarine and then you close the door. And you go through this process. Now you’re at the very end, and you’re at this magical part in the submarine that’s called the closing.
But that’s just not the way it works in real life. What I teach is something that I call micro commitments. And so it’s almost this running thread that goes all the way through all of your conversations where you’re getting micro commitments, you’re getting them to take small steps towards that utopia that you want to deliver. And so those small steps can be … one that I love is, “oh, so right now you’re not meeting with your IT company every quarter so that you know what kind of things have changed in your services and productivity?” “No, not at all.” “So a quarterly meeting like that wouldn’t be helpful to you?” “No, it absolutely would be helpful.” “Oh, okay.”
Well, you just got a micro commitment that your quarterly business review process is important to them. So you file that away, you’re going to bring it up during the presentation mode, right, which is probably a better way to describe that last compartment of the submarine, you are proposing, you are telling, you are solving the problem, but you are not closing. And so all of these micro commitments things like, well, is that a level of risk you are comfortable with? We can talk about where employees are clicking, and when they click, will they give away passwords, will the bad guys now have access to your email or your online banking, or your intellectual property. Is that a level of risk you’re okay with? “No, not at all?” Well, they just made a micro step in the direction of where you want them to go. And then subtly, without even realizing it, they just took a step away from where they are right now.
And that’s really important. Because when you study closing rates, and you study what deals actually close, sometimes you are losing to another MSP, you’re losing to another IT provider, that’s very normal … but more often, you’re losing to the incumbent. Because what happens is, that prospect calls you and they have this really small irritation, it’s like poison ivy, it’s really irritating and it finally got to the point where they’re now reaching out for other prices, other bids, other ways of doing business. But if that irritation is something like, “well, they just take a couple of days to call us back or, well, I have this printing problem, and it took them a day or two to resolve.” That’s not a super compelling reason to get them to move from someone they have a relationship with, they know, like and trust … you know, they know, like and trust them and they are a little bit annoyed. But you’re asking them to divorce that person and marry you and, “I couldn’t print very fast” is not very compelling.
Shelly Miller
Right. Mike was just talking about framing. The way that you framed that was excellent. You are not throwing the current vendor under the bus, you don’t need to. They’ve called you for some reason. And those micro commitments you can get and learn from by asking them questions is excellent. Then you use those micro commitments, as you said, the ones you file away to provide in your presentation – I love that!
Jennifer Bleam
So the other reason that you’ve got to be careful with that incumbent is, if you’re talking to the decision maker that picked that incumbent, that decision maker has this cognitive dissonance where they picked someone that they thought was a phenomenal provider, and now all of a sudden, they’re looking to replace that provider and does that mean that they made a bad decision? Does it mean they are a bad businessperson? And so you have to be super cautious not to throw the incumbent under the bus directly. You can simply say, oh, is that another important thing for you? Oh, you haven’t changed anything in the last three years? That seems like a pretty big risk.
I mean, like on a scale of one to five, what level of risk is that to you, that you haven’t changed anything, but the bad guys have? That’s probably a risk factor of five, that seems pretty risky. Okay, and are you naturally a risk taker when it comes to your business? No, not at all. Okay, then we should probably address that. Yes, let’s address that. So there’s a micro commitment where they’re stepping towards you, but they are subconsciously stepping away from the incumbent, which is exactly what you want them to do.
This is taking the air out of the balloon. This is why with sales, you can’t just buy a playbook and like a robot, I’m going to say the words that Jennifer told me to say. It doesn’t work that way. I give scripts, I give frameworks, but we all have different personalities, we all sell differently, every situation is different. And so, there’s … it is an art as much as it is a science. And so you need a lot of practice. So you’ve got to lean on your marketing to bring in a lot of leads, so that you can get that practice. Because if you’re going to have a 50% close rate, that means that half the time you don’t close the sale, well, hopefully you learn something from those sales that you didn’t close, that you can then apply in the future, and you do start to make out your playbook and now you’ve got … did you call it tribal knowledge?
Mike Miller
Yes.
Jennifer Bleam
You’re starting to build your book, of tribal knowledge, but you can only do that if you’ve got sufficient lead flow. You can close 50%, or you can close 50% and learn from it. If you only get three leads a year, it’s not a whole lot of practice. Like I can’t go out in my front yard, if I had a basketball hoop and shoot three times and expect to be an expert.
Shelly Miller
Right.
Jennifer Bleam
You have to have that practice. So marketing and sales are that yin and yang, they are two sides of the same coin.
Shelly Miller
Definitely, we hear a lot of people, who get frustrated with sales. Their close rates are low or they think they’re not good at selling. But when you ask them how many appointments, they’ve had
Mike Miller
At bats
Shelly Miller
Yes, and they say well, I haven’t really sold anything for months, you know, and but the funny thing about humans is we think that we should be good at everything even with no practice. Or like you said, I haven’t been shooting basketballs, but I should be able to go out there and shoot three in a row. Why not? You know,
Mike Miller
I’ve been imagining it a lot.
Shelly Miller
Exactly. So the more you practice, and write down the good and bad things, the wins and losses you are learning is very important. I don’t think a lot of people go back and review what they’ve done and look at the benefits and the things they could have done or said differently on a call or presentation. Keep those notes and if you keep practicing, you will continue to remember the feedback you get, what worked and what didn’t work. Then each presentation will get easier.
Like I said earlier, keep recordings of your calls. And also, keep those notes in a CRM. We encourage all of the salespeople and even some of the marketing teams to keep that information. Because if they’re hearing a lot that somebody wants to have, like, for example, one that we just got was they wanted to hear the budget first. So they didn’t want to hear the sales pitch, they wanted to hear the budget first. So it’s been a long running question with numbers we have on closes if the budget was discussed first or last.
Mike Miller
Yes, so do you change your presentation based on one person’s feedback?
Shelly Miller
Or have you heard this several times.
Jennifer Bleam
I tell all of my students, I call it a sales call debrief. Every sales call, I want you to debrief. And I did this when I was selling for my husband’s MSP. I was talking to someone, I had a poor mindset, like I was grumbling. I didn’t have a sales manager to debrief my sales calls with. One of my colleagues, thankfully, called me off the carpet and said, well, that’s an excuse. And I’m like, it’s not an excuse. I don’t have a sales manager. He was like, so what? You are a sales manager, manage yourself.
I thought, aww that’s tough love, but it’s true. And so on the next sales call, I literally sat out in the parking lot, this was the first time I used that legal pad, I created a form. I wrote down what went well and what didn’t go well. There were certain skills I was working on at the time, like bonding and rapport, so I thought on scale of one to five, how did that go? And then the staples are, what objections did you hear? How did you overcome them? What things went really well? When you walk out of the sales call and you’re like, man, I never said it that well before. Don’t just pat yourself on the back and go on the next sales call. Take a minute to document that, or if you have a recording, pull that out so that you can practice it, and that becomes part of how you do it the next time.
Document what didn’t go well because there’s always things we want to say, and it sounds really good in our head and it comes out in different words.
Shelly Miller
That never happens, I have no idea what you’re talking about…
Jennifer Bleam
I have heard that it happens to some people. I always had to write down, did you take the next step? Because we had a multi-step sales process. And I would ask myself, did you schedule the network audit? And I had to write that down because I was walking out of sales calls pumped up, I had great rapport and I uncovered pain. You know, but I forgot to schedule that network audit. And I’d realize it and have to circle, no I didn’t schedule a network audit. And then the next sales calls like, okay, I had a couple of new objections, I gotta go back and figure out how to overcome them next time. Did you schedule an audit? Jennifer, you numbskull, NO!
So I had to circle no a second time. Well, guess what, when I went into my next sales call I almost forgot about bonding and rapport and overcoming objections because I was getting that network audit. But had I not been doing that debrief … what happens is we fall into these patterns and it could be four months from now and you’re looking at your close rate going, man, I’m not closing deals, what in the world went wrong? And you realize that four months ago, you stopped following your process because you weren’t actually managing yourself. Or your manager wasn’t managing you, whatever your situation is, you fell off the wagon without realizing it.
It’s such a powerful practice to just go back and debrief all of your sales calls. Am I following the basics am I following my process? What new objections am I getting that I didn’t get before? It could be, how much do you come on site because I don’t want you bringing your Coronavirus. These are new things, there will always be new objections. If you’re getting, “I want to see your pricing” well, if you’re getting that a lot, let’s figure out how to handle that and how to tap dance around it and how to overcome it. And then ideally, overcome it before it even happens in the sales call. But if you’re not taking the time to think that through, then you just get too busy. And you won’t learn and you won’t get a raise.
Shelly Miller
Right, it feels like a struggle. You know, you feel like you’ll never be successful because you just aren’t learning. You need to step back and review what you are doing.
Jennifer Bleam
Yes. It is like the US Navy Seals say, “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” What they are trying to say is slow down a little bit and let’s just take a look at what’s working and what’s not working. Let’s iterate, let’s improve, then we can go faster but taking time and slowing down and carving out time to think isn’t easy.
Shelly Miller
It’s not, but it’s one of the most valuable things. But we devalue it.
Jennifer Bleam
Right, the act of putting a block on my Outlook calendar is not particularly difficult but finding that block and sticking to it is challenging.
Shelly Miller
It’s definitely challenging. It’s like, oh, there’s that block. I’ll move that to tomorrow.
Jennifer Bleam
It is interesting that Japanese executives are actually required every week to have hours of thinking time. It’s a job requirement. We don’t do that here, at least in the States, we aren’t particularly good at taking time to think. We’ve elevated busyness. And you know, how much work did I get done? Well, thinking is work, it’s hard work. But you can’t just squeeze it into a two-minute time frame. You need some dedicated time to get into the zone and think. And whether it’s about your marketing or about your sales process or about objections, you have to have that time to think and analyze.
Mike Miller
Absolutely, that’s excellent information. I hope you guys are taking notes, because this is excellent. I wanted to go back real fast on something you said about micro commitments. You’re not talking about a yes set, right? You’re not trying to get people to go yes, yes. yes?
Jennifer Bleam
No, not in the beginning. Eventually, yes, there should be a “so would you like me to create a proposal, or what would you like to do for the next step, I know this is an investment for you?” Of course, we need that. That final closing question. But no, I’m talking about little buy ins. Little, “yeah, it sounds good to me.” For instance, if I’m bringing someone in to redo my kitchen. They’re not going to say okay, make all your choices.
They are going to say “let’s deal with your backsplash first, then we’re going to pick the counter and then we’re going to pick the sink, then we’re going to pick the cabinets and then we are going to pick the wall color.” And so every time you agree to one little thing, you are getting closer to working with that contractor to overhaul your kitchen. Realtors do this brilliantly. They are like, can you see yourself living in this living room? What do you think of this backyard?
Mike Miller
Welcome home.
Jennifer Bleam
I just lost his name. But there’s an older sales trainer that if you say, “I love this living room.” A good realtor will say, “well, how will you arrange your furniture?”
“Well, my couch will be over there and my TV is over there.” And he says, okay, so you just bought a living room and the house came with it.
Mike Miller
Yes.
Jennifer Bleam
That’s what you’re doing, you’re selling them security, or selling them the ability to protect their intellectual property and keep their business going. You are selling them, let’s make sure your company doesn’t grind to a halt because of cyber incidents. And your services just happen to deliver that.
That’s what you are doing. It’s the analogy of, like, I’m getting them to commit to a living room, and the whole rest of the house just comes with it. You are getting them to commit to, yes, employee education is important. And yes, I definitely want to make sure that I don’t have downtime. And, of course, I want you to answer the phone when I call you, eight to five or 24 /7 or whatever is important to them. And what you’re doing is you’re building their plan in the back of your mind, but you’re delivering to them what they want. They’re creating, their own utopia. You just happen to be delivering it to them.
Shelly Miller
Excellent
Mike Miller
Yes that’s great. And, and you’re doing it through natural conversation, correct?
Jennifer Bleam
Yes.
Mike Miller
Instead of creating some kind of manipulative pattern or some craziness.
Jennifer Bleam
Yes, it’s so funny. I was at a conference in California back when you were allowed to travel. It was a business building conference. And someone says, oh, what do you do? And I said, I’m in cybersecurity, I’m a sales trainer. And she said, oh, I have a bunch of cyber security questions. Can I ask you? And I’m like, sure. She was, what I would say is a typical small business owner. She had seven or eight employees plus someone came in on the side. So between the owner that I was talking to, it’s a 10-person, medical practice, she did physical therapy, and some alternative medicine options.
And she started asking me questions like, you know, what about HIPAA? What about my email? Can I use Gmail or not? I keep hearing HIPAA compliance, is this who gives me the seal of approval? Do I really need to worry about this? I’m a small business owner, is this really going to impact me. And it was a great conversation over dinner. And it was just like, two women talking. And I think that was the epitome of … see, I didn’t have to force anything, I didn’t have anything to sell her first of all, but I didn’t force anything down her throat, I just said, what questions do you have? You know I’m happy to help. And I think if you position yourself that way, and just want to help, I’m happy help.
If I happen to be able to help you, of course I’ll make an offer. But if I can’t, maybe I have some resources I can share, some checklists, some free reports, somebody who can serve you better. And so if you come from that perspective, that I’m just here to help, I think it was Zig Ziglar who said, if you help enough people get what they want, eventually, you’ll get what you want as well. And that is so true in life. It is so true in business that, literally if you can just help people sleep better at night. Some of those people are going to do business with you. And so isn’t this adversarial relationship of I want to sell you something, well I don’t want to buy.
Actually, I just want to help you, I just want to make sure you’re as safe as you can be, as secure as you can be, as efficient as you can be, and if that happens to be something I can help with – of course, I’m going to make you an offer, I’m a business owner. And I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t make you an offer. But it is very conversational, because you’re just chatting, we’re just having a conversation. And you’re in control. You’re guiding it and you are heading towards the finish line. But you can’t make anybody do anything. It’s like trying to make my 20-year-old do whatever, fill in the blank, maybe when he was two I could make him do something, but not now, he’s an adult.
You can’t control another adult. I can help them to see the value of what I’m doing when I’m invited, but I can’t make them. I’m not trying to manipulate them. If I’m not the right fit as an MSP, then they are not going to be a good client anyway. They would be uncomfortable and grumpy and no one wants to service them and they’ll never pay their bills, so whatever. So, it is just a very natural conversation.
Shelly Miller
Yes, I think that comes out when you don’t approach sales as, I have to close this or else I’m going to starve or I’m not going to meet my numbers. I mean, when you can look at it as I am calling this person because I believe I have something that might help them, the call is just so much easier. The call goes better and the process goes better and it turns conversational automatically because you’re not trying to do anything other than see if you can help. So you are not trying to make sure you get the sale so you don’t starve. You have the right mindset, you are calling because you think you have a solution that will help.
Jennifer Bleam
You do. It goes back to marketing, right? Because if this is the sale that you do need to make – to make payroll or to feed your family or to make the rent payment on your office … whatever, fill in the blank, if you need that sale: prospects can smell desperation a mile away.
Really. Like we can all say … oh, you know, you need to go in with the right mindset and you shouldn’t need the sale. And that’s all 100% true. But what if I do need the sale? Well, don’t be desperate. What if I am desperate? Well, don’t be desperate. Ok, but what if I am? So then it’s like, alright, so you are desperate, go in and do the best you can. But then what you have to do is solve that problem.
That is like an algebra problem. We are solving for that desperation, but we are desperate because we need more leads, because we need a better sales process. So you can’t fake not being desperate. Okay, if they’re gonna smell it, they’re going to smell it. If you are desperate, you’re desperate. But then, go in, work the sale, do the best you can, try to disconnect from the outcome, but then think, okay, why was I so desperate? Well, I haven’t made a sale this year, or I don’t have any leads, or my pipeline is dry, or I don’t have a good process, or they really weren’t the right fit but I need the right revenue. Ok, why do you need the revenue? Whatever, let’s figure out what that problem is and then solve it.
Mike Miller
Exactly. I’m also Sandler trained. And I remember asking the Sandler sales trainer one day I said, you know, help me with some words to get this guy to buy. I need this guy to buy. And he said, you want to know the secret? I said yes. He said, you need more strategy sessions.
Jennifer Bleam
Yes, in other words you can’t make him buy.
Mike Miller
Exactly. You know, focus on what you can control, get more strategy sessions. You know, the more “at bats” you have, the better your odds.
Jennifer Bleam
I know, because we all love talking about the closing rate. Right? And, of course, you should improve it and get your closing rate as high as you possibly can. But it’s that “at bats” that can dramatically affect the bottom line, even if the closing rate doesn’t change.
You can’t win every deal. There’s always going to be something you can improve, you are never going to have a perfect sales meeting. But I think that you just hit the nail on the head. If I only have three “at bats” all year long, I want to make sure all three of them are perfect so I can close the three deals I need to close.
What if you have twelve “at bats” this year, then you could close three of them. That means that you lost nine of them, but it’s a place to start from and improve. Getting more of the leads in that funnel is so important.
Mike Miller
Yes, exactly. That reminds me of another quick question, Sandler, is really focused on pain, finding the pain, discovering the pain. How far do I take that? Because we need to have bobcats, we need to point out the bobcats. But how far do we take it? Especially when we’re thinking about closing someone?
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, so this is the answer no one likes, right? It really depends on your industry and the type of sales you do. So in the MSP world, your goal is to get them to the point where they have enough pain where they’re, ready to make the change. And I actually look at discovery a little bit differently. So many people will look at Discovery as if the prospect is holding this deck of cards, like we’re playing go fish and I say, do you have a seven and they are like I’m not telling you if I have a seven, go fish.
And if the salesperson can somehow manipulate the conversation or ask the right questions, then the prospect is willing to answer your question but if you don’t, the salesperson is at a loss or they’re out of control. Don’t look at it that way. I actually think discovery is the salesperson helping the prospect to discover what the salesperson already probably knows. There is not a whole lot of surprises anymore. Like if you do a network audit, we’re going to find the servers missing anti-virus or one of the computers is missing anti-virus, or the updates haven’t been run on all of the machines.
We know what we are going to discover, but what we need to do is help the client, or the prospect, discover how this is impacting their business. Help the prospect discover that their little problem of oh, I couldn’t print, and this is really irritating is really this massive Grand Canyon of a problem. Because you ask really good questions and help them discover how it really was impacting them, and they just realize it. So I flipped discovery as well. I don’t think discovery is about me as a salesperson finding this clue that the prospect is holding back from me simply because I didn’t ask the right magic wand question. I think discovery is about helping the prospect discover how woefully inadequate their existing service is and how horrible it’s impacting their business. And so it’s a very different approach, it’s a very different conversation.
Shelly Miller
Excellent. That’s gold. That’s what discovery should be.
Mike Miller
Absolutely. Well, we both really appreciate you taking the time to be on our podcast. It means a lot to us.
Jennifer Bleam
It’s my pleasure, it’s been a lot of fun.
Shelly Miller
And we’d love to have you back.
Mike Miller
Yeah, absolutely.
Jennifer Bleam
I would love it!
Shelly Miller
Great.
Mike Miller
Well, we’re gonna hold you to it. Where can people find out more about you and learn what you have to offer?
Jennifer Bleam
Yeah, for sure. So my website is, mspsalesrevolution.com there is all kinds of information about me, my background, how I can help. My signature offer right now is that I am the cybersecurity sherpa. And so if you need help figuring out your packages, your pricing, how you climb the mountain of cyber security, I’ve got all kinds of information out there, as well as some free assets and resources to help you become a better salesperson.
Mike Miller
Wonderful.
Shelly Miller
Excellent, and you have some great freebies too.
Jennifer Bleam
I do. There are discovery questions, there’s implications on the cyber incidents, and all of those different implications matter to the roles differently. So like, the CEO doesn’t care, that they won’t be able to make a phone call. But the office manager cares if the phone system is down, so all of the different implications of a cyber incident are mapped to who cares about this, because the CEO has different cares and concerns than the CFO, which is different than the Office Manager or Practice Manager, so that’s up there as well, all kinds of goodies.
Shelly Miller
Wonderful. We’ll have those linked in our description so everyone can go get those free downloads, as well as links to your YouTube channel and your Facebook page.
Mike Miller
Yes, check them out. Like, subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when she puts out new content.
Jennifer Bleam
Absolutely, I love it, that would be great.
Mike Miller
Like I said, if you want to leave Basecamp and reach the pinnacle of success with your MSP, there’s no one better to guide you than Jennifer Bleam.
Shelly Miller
That’s the truth!
Jennifer Bleam
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Mike Miller
Thanks, Jennifer!
Shelly Miller
Thanks Jennifer!
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