You know why you're different than the competition, But the key way to stand out as a seller is to get the customer to care about the differentiation.
You're listening to the Audible Ready podcast, The show that helps you and your teams sell more Faster. Will feature sales leaders sharing their best insights on how to create a sales engine that helps you fuel repeatable revenue growth, presented by the team at Force Management, a leader in B to B sales effectiveness. Let's get started.
Hello, I'm Rachel Klatt Miller. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Audible Ready Sales Podcast. You know, we often say that there is as much differentiation and how you sell as there is in what you sell. So what do we mean by that. That's what we're going to talk about today. Key steps you can take to differentiate the way you sell, how you do it, John Kaplan, This is something we know that elite sellers do and are continually striving to get better at.
Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics. It's differentiation for most people is hard, and I think that we kind of simplify it with some ideas that you can do with not a lot of effort, just some mindset right.
Kind of your day to day rhythm. You know, we always say that sales is a game of inches, and those things you can do to differentiate you in the way you sell is part of the game of inches. When you talk about them on the surface level, they don't seem like that much, but add them up over time and they can really make a difference. So let's get into some of the ways you can do that. The first area I want to talk about is what
you can do with those initial calls, your discovery. I know we've done a whole podcast on this, but it really comes down to approaching them with empathy and understanding.
Yeah, and I think that's really good. It's a mindset. It's a mindset of empathy, understanding, and also a kind of preparation. We've got to remember, buyers are skeptical, abous. They they think that we're like all the other bad sellers that they've encountered before. And by differentiating yourself, you'll give yourself an edge. And I think the first step is to be confident in what you do for a living and to constantly put yourself in the shoes of
the buyer. You don't just show up begging for orders. That's a horrible disposition. Your job is to understand your customers by listening to them, and don't just work through a script. If somebody gives you a script, it's not intended. It's a navigational tool. It's not intended to be a script. Approach your conversation with empathy and understanding and that'll show through.
That's it. And the way you do discovery is really so critical. Asking questions at the right time in the right way requires prep having that right mindset, as you talked about, but also active listening. So what are your best ways to prepare to do this?
Well? Preparation and active listening is really the only way. When you prepare, it gives you a calmness, it gives We call this the Audible Ready podcast, and what we mean by that is because you're prepared, you can actively listen, and you actively listen because you're prepared. And you know, we talk about three buckets. When I go into sales calls, I know that there are three main buckets of information
that I am gathering constantly. The first they're in no particular order, but positive business outcomes those are the implications of the problem that create great business outcomes. That's one bucket. I'm also looking for technical required capabilities. And in order to understand the technical required capabilities, you have to ask
great discovery questions to the customer. But you have to be prepared with your differentiation because you are shaping those required capabilities to be more favorable for your customer and more favorable for you in the form of your differentiation. And then metrics, and this is we need to discover how they're going to measure success. So when I'm prepared to ask discovery questions around those three buckets, I just I think of myself as like a catcher in baseball.
I throw the pitch back to the pitcher and then they throw me something, and whatever they throw me, it's either a positiveusiness outcome or require capability or a metric. I am putting those in the proper buckets. And when I think about simplifying that way, it's easier for me to actively listen.
Yeah, So let's talk about the situations that you might find yourself in when you're going against competitive solutions. Right, that's a product differentiation point, but you all so play a role in it as a seller to in how you are dealing with that differentiation.
You know why you're different than the competition. But the key way to stand out as a seller is to get the customer to care about the differentiation. So it's not just knowing the differentiation. It's got to be a value to the customer. So they need to see the value in that differentiation, and if they don't, you'll just sound like all those other bad sellers. And if you don't know what kind of relationship they have with a competitor. Most times people are trying to go at differentiation to
talk about how much they're better than the competition. Well, you've got to earn the right for that, because people, by nature are loyal to those not present. So use the differentiation as a way to bring value to the customer. So saying I'm better than the competitors is great. Everybody says it, right, But it's only great if you believe it,
and it's only great if the customer believes it. So what differentiates me as a seller is when I can get my customer to care about the differentiation as it relates to their outcomes. Let me give you a quick example. When I first got to PTC years ago, we had this differentiation, which is actually unique, and it was called bi directional associativity. Now, when I first saw it, they explained it to me, a change made anywhere is reflected everywhere.
Now I'm kind of a Microsoft generation, so when I heard this, I was a little disappointed, a little freaked out. I'm like, wait a second, So you mean a change made anywhere, like in a document, is reflected at was kind of like global find and replace. And the people at PTC that were training me, they're like, exactly, And I was like, oh my god, Like, I just left ten years at Xerox in a very high level job to come as a front line manager to PTC for this. Well,
I obviously didn't understand the differentiation. I didn't understand the value. I had to put myself in the seat of the customer. So one of the trainers asked me. They said, John, do you understand the way people design and manufacture products? And I'm like, no, I don't really understand that. So they taught me and they're like, when you make a change late in a process, it creates havoc on a manufacturing environment and design through manufacturing environment. So the fact
that we can make a change anywhere. Everything is updated, the drawings, the tooling. It's like at the press of a button, everything's updated. So I was like, okay, And then I saw my first demo and I saw the application engineer Rachel demonstrate this, and there was a CEO of a manufacturing company sitting in the demo, sitting in the room watching the demo, and I looked over and
their jaw hit the table. So what I did was I asked a few questions and say, hey, that looks like that this could be pretty important for your organization. Why did you react that way to what you just saw? Tell me how you're currently doing that. And I just started asking discovery questions around the emotion that I got back from what I was saying. And then I later I learned it's like, okay, once you learned a differentiation,
you have to ask yourself some questions. So what if the customer doesn't have bi directional associativity, Well, that means that they can't handle changes very often, and when they do handle changes, it creates a massive timing implication. It creates a massive scrap and waste implication in the manufacturing department. So once I understood what it's like to not have it. I started to ask questions about problems and implications of
not having that differentiation. It totally totally changed the world for me. So my point is, when you hear your company's differentiation, you have to ask yourself, so what does that mean to the buyer? And once I did that, it unlocks something very very powerful for me because once I understood the problems, I didn't just tell them about
the problems Rachel. I asked them about when they encounter those problems or challenges, And it totally turned the ownership to their problem, not my problem, and I was ready to help them with my differentiation. A huge, huge learning lesson for me.
Yeah, and a key way when you do that repeatedly to differentiate yourself from other salespeople they might be dealing with. So we talked about discovery, we talked about differentiation. The other component is you want to make sure you're continually staying tied to their positive business outcomes, the results you're
trying to drive for them. And you might align on this at the beginning of the sales process, but then people forget about them, right, So to keep everyone focused on that value, you're going to drive and the outcomes you're going to drive for them is really a next level skill.
Yeah, let's just simplify this. I think the two greatest elite skills of selling right now, there's actually three, I believe, but the three greatest skills. Number one is attaching yourself to the biggest business issue facing your customer, Attaching what you do for a living to the biggest problems and challenges and getting credit for it. The second thing is influencing, like we just said, influencing customer decision criteria with your differentiation.
In the case of the bi directional associativity example that I just gave you, Rachel, is I knew that if I got bidirectional associativity or in the customer's language, a change made anywhere is reflected everywhere. Rachel, we won every time. So let me just simplify that. All I needed to do was to influence that differentiation into the customers required capabilities into the decision criteria, and since it was unique, meaning nobody else could do it, the ballgame was over.
The third one is we have to be a voracious qualifier. You have to be a voracious qualifier, so we have to keep customers focused on measurable outcomes that they're looking to achieve and the require capabilities that are going to get them there, and your customers are often frazzled like they're too close to the pain and they're too close to the technical pain and the implications of that technical pain.
And sometimes example, with the bi directional of sociativity, I would ask, give me an example of the biggest project that you're working on right now. They tell me about a product, and I'd say, so with the ability to make changes, what do you think late in the process, what will happen with your relationship with the customer, What will happen with the relationship to the cost model, What
will happen to the relationship with revenue? What will happen to so all of a sudden, this bi directional associativity is connected to business outcomes. And what were we known for at PTC. What bidirectional associativity turned into RACHEL was reducing time to market for manufacturers by more than fifty percent on average. That's why we grew from zero to a billion dollars. We were known by the business outcome we help customers achieve just as much as we were
known by our differentiation in the product capabilities. So sometimes you have to keep reminding because this means things to different people at different levels than an organization. I used to constantly have to do this. I have to remind the engineers, Yes, it was great for your engineering capability, but it was also great for the company. And I found that I was able to build great champions inside of organizations because I got them emotionally connected to that
business implication of that technical capability. So bi directional associativity was tied to reducing time to market, and reducing time to market was associated with massive growth and profitability for product launches. And we created thousands and thousands of technical champions and the business champions by just connecting that technical capability to a business outcome. Really really powerful.
Yeah, and something that you can do in every opportunity that you're in. A great thing to be focused on. The Next point I wanted to talk about is what happens away from the deal, Away from the opportunity. What are you doing when there isn't something to work with the customer, And that's making sure you're sharing value with customers and prospects.
I like this a lot because there's some elite sellers that do this really well. And I think that the greatest sellers. You know, back in the day they said, oh, he or she is a relationship builder, and that got a lot of knocks. They're like, oh, this person's a relationship builder. And I always used to cock my head to one side a little bit, like how is that a bad thing? Like every single stat in the world, the importance of relationship on personal health, the importance of relationship.
I'm building champions. You're never going to build champions if you don't build a relationship, and you build a relationship by continuously adding value. So this moniker of a relationship seller, I think just totally got messed up there thinking people are dropping off donuts. And I don't think that's what anybody ever meant when they said a relationship seller. What I mean by a relationship seller is that you are constantly communicating with your customer and you have a reason.
You have purpose. It's not just.
Hey, how you doing? You know, do you want to upgrade? How's the product going? Blah blah blah. Maybe it's your marketing team put together a piece of thought leadership. I just saw rep today from Force Management sent something out to a prospect, actually a customer, they're already a customer, and.
It was a great value added piece on something that they had been talking about a year ago and something that came out in the marketplace and they sent it to the customer. And that's constantly adding value, that's constantly staying on the customer's mind, letting them know that you're thinking about. Your job is not only to sell them stuff, but your job is to make the company successful, their
company successful, and them successful. So you got to stay connected, you got to reach out, and you got to add value, keep the lines of communication open. You never know where that person is going to end up. You know, most of champions, most examples of champions, wind up being champions in multiple companies, in multiple situations. So the point here, Rachel is always stay tethered, always stay connected, and always add value.
Yeah, that's differentiating how you sell. As we said, it's anthony understanding and discovery. Differentiation in a way that the buyer cares about, sharing value on the sales process, focus on those positive business outcomes, and stay tethered. Ways to differentiate yourself. I know you've got a great bottom line here, though, John, I'd like.
To begin it with what you just said, So let's write this one down. How you sell can be just as as important as what you sell. Huge preparation helps you be an active listener. You can't actively listen if you're just kind of listening to pieces and parts of what a customer is telling you and you're waiting to make your next statement. When you're prepared with great discovery, you're prepared with the three buckets of positive business outcome.
Require capabilities and metrics and great discovery around that, you can actively listen so much better. Fill up the three buckets that we talked about, make your differentiation purposeful and valuable, and connect what you do always to business outcomes. And that is a formula that will never never equal failure. So always be differentiating whether you're selling a product or you're selling your relationship of value to that buyer.
That's it. Thank you, John, You're welcome, and thank you to all of you for listening to the Audible Ready Sales podcast.
At Force Management, we're focused on transforming sales organizations into elite teams. Our proven methodologies deliver programs that build company alignment and fuel repeatable revenue growth. Give your teams, the ability to execute the growth strategy at the point of sale. Our strength is our experience. The proof is in our results. Let's get start. Visit us at forestmanagement dot com.
You've been listening to the audible Ready podcast. To not miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player until next time.