How do I tell a good customer story?

[T SEA]
TRUISM - Problem we all agree with
SOLUTION - How we WANT to solve it
EXAMPLE - Customer example
ADVANTAGE - What were the benefits

What we have OBSERVED/SEE/ARE SEEING from our customer base is that {TRUISM}......
This is of BENEFIT because {ADVANTAGE}

[TRUISM]I'M SURE YOU WILL AGREE....Users to your website may often be suffering from information overload and do not even know what to search for.

[SOLUTION]We want to take the user BY THE HAND & GUIDE THEM to relevant content.

[EXAMPLE]A leading Global bank they use query completion to give the user sign posts as to where they can go next without the customer having to explicitly request that information.

[ADVANTAGE]The bank has seen a reduction in calls to the call centre as users are becoming much more self-sufficient.

How do I organise my communications?

http://www.bnet.com/2422-13722_23-435596.html?tag=col1;post-4310

1.DESCRIBING/EXPLAINING: "Where we are coming from...where we are today...where we want to get to...how we are going to get there..."

"on the one hand,...., on the other hand,.....on the balance"
"firstly,....secondly,....,finally"
"In this presentation I want to share.."

2. TELL THEM WHAT GOING TO TELL THEM

"So, what we are going to do is.."

"In this presentation I want to share.."

2.ASKING: "Where are you coming from..where you are now...where you want to be..how can you get there?"



3.TALK TO OTHERS + YOURSELF - Speak as if you too are a listener:
- This gives you a calm composed pace.
- Prevents you rambling and getting lost.
- Conveys a sense of thoughtfulness.
- Gives you time to think about what to say next.
- Allows you listen and understand what would sound best next.


4.TALK 3rd PERSON - Step out of yourself and observe:
"I want to be able to go to them an say, "here is what you had".."here is how we can improve it"..this is what you require"

"If he comes to me and says...I want to be able to..."

"If you were me, how would you"

"Here's what i want to be able to do..I want to"


Getting to the Point & Being
Remembered
Techniques to package persuasion
Structuring ideas simply and clearly
Speaking in different situations:
one-on-one, on the phone, in meetings,
informal presentations, E-mails
Presenting Your Ideas
Using three-part plans to display
analysis
Helping your listener understand
by placing your ideas into a simple,
unifying structure
Relying on structured reasoning to
answer questions quickly
Using Handy Fall-Back Techniques
When You’re Caught Off
Guard
Making sense out of a mass of facts
Explaining step-by-step processes
clearly
Handling Questions Quickly,
Clearly and Persuasively
Following the “Rule of Threes”
Creating logical pegs to hang your
thoughts on
Announcing & Recapping
Using “Visual” Pegs as Your
Structure
Achieving impact
Supporting large or complex topics
Adding depth to your message
Avoiding Common
Communication Traps
Keeping on track
Avoiding information overload
Addressing your listener’s core
concerns
Dividing Information into Facets,
Aspects or Perspectives
Achieving objectivity
Expressing thoughtfulness
Addressing issues from different
viewpoints
•••
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•••
•••
Bridging from Question to Answer
Buying time
Answering the right question
Handling objections and tough
questions positively
How to Broaden or Focus Your
Listener’s Perspective
Moving from detail to big picture, or
vice versa
Handling sensitive or confidential
information
Countering sweeping generalizations
Moving Two Opposing Viewpoints
to a Middle Ground
Negotiating a win-win outcome
Dealing with controversial topics
Moving to action
Selling the Benefits of Your Ideas,
Products, Services
Presenting benefits, not features
Showing advantages to your listener
Employing the “So what?” test
Fleshing Out Your Ideas
Using examples to increase understanding
& recall
Developing ideas through the use
of opposites
Explaining an idea by cause & effect
“Think on Your Feet is still as fresh in
my mind today as the day after training.
Participants throughout our firm tell me
the same is true for them. The program’s
distinctive competence is built around
three equally important facets – structure,
simplicity, and creativity.”
Bob Dean,
Chief Learning Officer,
Grant Thornton LLP
See www.thinkonyourfeet.com for
dates, locations and registration fees.
Also available in-company for groups.

How do be a great leader?

premise that leaders who act as “multipliers” make others smarter and more able, while “diminshers” reduce their abilities and make them act less capably. Multipliers builds on the decades-old thinking of scarcity vs. abundance; research on organizational connectors, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point; and advice on making managers more humane, such as Bev Kaye and Sharon Jordan-Evans’ Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em. Here’s what Wiseman found:

Multipliers attract and unlock talent, and diminishers build empires
Multipliers inquire into mistakes, while diminishers assign blame
Multipliers set direction by challenging assumptions, and diminishers act as know-it-alls
Multipliers spark debate, while diminishers tell people what to do
Multipliers invest for the long term, and diminishers micromanage

PWG - INTRO

1. BEFORE I DO THAT LET ME FIRST , __ .
2. LET ME TELL YOU WHY , __ .LET ME TELL YOU HOW , __ .
3. LET ME SHOW YOU WHY , __ . LET ME SHOW YOU HOW , __ .
4. A 3rd KEY PILLAR I'D LIKE TO TALK ABOUT IS, __ .
5. DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?
6. PICTURE FOR A MOMENT, __ .
7. CAST YOUR MIND BACK FOR A MOMENT TO, __ .
8. AM I MAKING SENSE?, __ .
9. CAN YOU SEE THESE BEING USED IN YOUR ORGANISATION? HOW CURRENTLY ACHIEVING?, __ .
10. AND WE'LL TOUCH ON THAT LATER IN THE PRESENTATION, __ .
11. OK?, __ .
12. YEAH?, __ .
13. RIGHT?, __ .
14. ANY QUESTIONS SO FAR?, __ .
15. ANY QUESTIONS BEFORE I MOVE ON?, __ .
16. WITH THAT IN MIND, LETS TAKE A LOOK AT, __ .
17. LET ME BREAK IT DOWN FOR YOU, __ .
18. LISTEN, __ .
19. LOOK, __ .
20. LET ME BREAK IT DOWN FOR YOU, __ .
21. OK, SO HERE'S THE DEAL THEN, __ .
22. OK, SO PICTURE THIS, __ .
23. OK, SO IMAGINE THIS, __ .
24. OK, SO IT'S LIKE THIS THEN, __ .
25. THAT BEING SAID HERE IS WHAT I WANT TO DO, __ .
26. GREAT QUESTION. LET ME TELL YOU HOW, __ .

How do I refuse a poor idea effectively?

1. listen. Don’t argue, disagree or interrupt. Think judo not boxing, use momentum against them. Encourage them to complete their explanation of their daft idea. They want to be heard and respected. If you argue too soon you will be met with “You don’t understand…let me explain” and you are into a win/lose time wasting argument.

2. The nice save. Start by praising the one element of the idea which is good. Do you tell a new mother that their baby is the ugliest the world has ever seen? A colleague’s idea is their baby: don’t insult it. Get the colleague emotionally on board by offering hope.

3. Find common cause. Go into praise overdrive. Thank your colleague for having the sense, courage and insight to tackle whatever issue they are trying to tackle. Show why the issue is so important: start to focus discussion on the desired outcome, not on the detail of their idea.

4. Empathise. Indicate that you had been thinking about the same thing, but struggling with it. You could find no way round three big problems, which just happen to be the three fatal flaws with the idea your colleague has suggested.

5. Work together to solve the problem. By now you should have refocused discussion away from their idea (which they will not want to change) to your problem (which they will be keen to show they can solve). The new solution should now provide a very agreeable alternative to the mad proposal which you first encountered. And, your colleague will think that is is all their own idea. No one argues with their own idea. In reality, you have won the argument and won a friend. Job done.

How do I demonstarte CEO prescence?

1.Genuine. Open, straightforward, comfortable in your skin; no BS or sugarcoating.

2.Passionate. You love and feel strongly about what you do and how you do it.

3.Articulate. Communicate thoughts, feelings, and insights in crystal clarity and simplicity.

4.Insightful. Ability to boil complex factors and mounds of data down to rare conclusions.

5.Determined. Driven and full of purpose, determined to achieve and succeed.

6.Confident. Not overconfident, but with enough self-doubt to be objective.

7.Humble. Willingness to admit mistakes, misjudgment, fear, and uncertainty is endearing.

8.Courageous. Willingness to take risks and take a position against considerable odds.

9.Funny. Not over-the-top, but in the right measure, brings down other’s defenses.

10.Empathetic. Connecting with others on an emotional level.

How do I bring value to customers the sales process?

* Geoffrey James: What’s the biggest limitation of the way companies sell B2B today?
* Jeff Thull:
Companies are not able to connect the value they provide to specific performance metrics (KPIs) within their customer’s organization and quantify the true financial impact their solution has on their customer’s business.
Most sales people are set up to communicate value by describing areas where their solution has an impact on individual organizations. However, that kind of value communication simply serves to commoditize the solution because their competitors are telling a similar story. What’s needed is a way to connect the value of the solution in terms of its ability to impact the customer’s ability to provide value to their own customers.
The key concept is that value doesn’t exist until it’s been achieved within your customer’s business.

How do you calculate value for a B2B solution?
There are three levels of value, increasing in order of complexity.
1. Product level - easiest to calculate -
characteristics of the product.
e.g. faster, more acurate or more durable and so forth.
Almost every company expresses value in this way as it is easiest to calculate and the value is seen as similar amongst competitors.

2.How a product changes a company’s processes.
e.g. It may reduce the labor required in the process, get the process completed faster or improve the quality of the process output.

In this case, the use of the solution within one process will likely impact process steps that precede the process your solution impacts as well as the processes that come after.
What makes this more difficult to measure is that you are now impacting cross-functional processes.

3. How those process changes actually make the company better able to service its own customers, and the financial impact that ability will have over time.
This cross-functional impact has a large multiplier effect as it ripples throughout the customer’s organization.

Can you give me an example?
Sure. Suppose that you’re selling a drug like Lipitor. Most sales people would address that sales opportunity by pointing out the value that’s inherent in the drug - it reduces cholesterol. That’s the first level of value.

However, the real value isn’t in that ability to lower cholesterol, but in the impact that a lower level of cholesterol has on the patient’s health. That’s the second level of value.

The highest level of value is the experience of life that the patient has as the result of remaining healthy for longer. That value is quite literally priceless.

I think I see what you mean. Can you give me a business example?
Take document imaging and document management. In most cases, document management solutions are sold based upon competitive contracts for millions of copies at a certain amount per page - a classic commodity sale.
However, if you go into a pharmaceutical firm and analyze the drug approval process, you discover that document management tools can cut the response time on a critical process step, responding to an information request from the FDA, from six weeks to two weeks.
That translates into labor savings, but more importantly, the cumulative effect of the shorter response times means that the drug gets approved more quickly, resulting in a more profitable product with less competition.
The impact is enormous - far beyond the savings that might be generated by a slightly lower cost per page in the document reproduction expense.

Why isn’t this way of thinking more common?
I think the main reason is the historical assumption that the buying customer will calculate the value, because they “know their business.”

The fact is they likely don’t know the unique impact of your type of solution.

Secondly, the people tasked with defining value - the marketing group - tend to depend on the customer to tell them the value - I guess this will sound cruel, but it is a bit like the blind leading the blind - and it is quite inadequate even at the product level of value.

We recently had a software client where the marketing group had provided the sales teams with 24 ways that their product creates value. Our analysis showed that 21 of the items on that list delivered less than 12% of the value, the top three on their list delivered 43% of the value and 45 percent of the REAL value came from just two items… both of which weren’t even on the original list.

How does this play out in a sales situation?
When a novice sales person tried to use those value points in a sales situation, it actually made the prospect LESS likely to buy. Because the list was so long, it made the product seem complicated, and each new item on the list required the prospect to consider how that value translated upward into the higher levels of value and what they would have to do to implement or use each feature. What’s worse, the list was almost identical to the list that the firm’s competitors were using, making the firm’s product seem like a commodity that could only compete on price.

That was the novice reps. What about the experienced ones?
What we found is that the top sales reps never used the value propositions that marketing had prepared for them. Instead, they focused on the two or three value items that made sense to the customer and built a story around them, showing how they would impact the prospect’s processes, and change the way that they operated. These top reps - and it was only about 3 to 7 percent, by the way - seemed to intuitively understand how to adapt the solution message to something that made sense to the prospect.

Why don’t companies simply change their value definitions?
In many cases, the sales executives themselves don’t understand these issues. In addition, the realization that a company has been selling value incorrectly in almost always something of an indictment of either sales management or the marketing group, implying that they don’t know how to do their job.
As a result, it’s usually only when a CEO recognizes they aren’t receiving the revenue growth they should from their high-value solutions that a company is able to focus long enough to address them adequately.

Is that how you’re helping companies?
We’re working with a number of companies, typically at a very high level, helping them quantify their “strategic value impact” and create a methodology for expressing connecting that value to specific performance metrics within their customers business.
The results have been quite dramatic. The foreword of the new edition of Mastering the Complex Sale explains how a division of Shell Oil applied this “higher level” of value quantification and went from $150 million from sales revenue with 110 salespeople to 750 million in sales revenue with 44 salespeople within five years.

PWG - BIG

1. IT HAS A LARGE MULTIPLIER EFFECT THAT RIPPLES THROUGHOUT THE ORGANISATION, __ .

How do buyers make sales decisions?

As you probably remember, neuroscience tells us that the left side of brain is always looking for a right or wrong answer it doesn’t tolerate shades of gray. It tends to be analytical, linear and skeptical and emotionally neutral. It also tends gets “paralysis by analysis” because it can never get enough information to make what it feels will be an entirely correct decision. By contrast, the right side is creative and imaginative. The ‘big picture’ right side interacts with the feeling power of the limbic or emotional brain. The emotional brain is where the ‘aha’ moments happen. Where the “I want that” or “I need that” feelings happen. The buyer has “gut reaction” and an image that allows them to make an emotional decision, such as the decision to trust someone or buy something. They can feel it and see it rather than quantifying.

Stories appeal immediately to the right side of the brain. As soon as somebody hears “once upon a time…” or “I’d like to tell you a story about the time…”, the listener relaxes and knows that no decisions need to be made immediately, but instead all that’s needed is to go along for the ride and listen for what might be important in the future. When it IS time to make a decision, the right side of the brain (which actually makes the decision) draws upon the stories it’s heard in order to judge whether or not a decision makes sense. The story can actually engulf the listener and the teller. The connection during the story can remain between the two people after the story is over, leaving the top sales reps with a connection that others can’t achieve.

No, it doesn’t. Unfortunately, the corporate world tends to get left brain thinkers to create PowerPoint presentations that are intended to provide left brain information to the left brain thinkers. So you end up with these incredibly long sales cycles, with committees and endless analyses because, even though people make emotional decisions, they’re trying to find a way to make a decision logically. This isn’t to say that left brain information isn’t useful; but it doesn’t drive buying behavior unless framed in a story that makes sense to the right brain.

What do sales pros need to become great storytellers?
MB: Great question. First, they need to respect their own storytelling ability. I’ve found that most sales professionals are much better at telling stories from their personal lives - the sort of anecdote you tell to your friends and family - than they are at telling stories from their business lives. People tend to be more relaxed when relating personal anecdotes, but then get all formal and stilted when they tell business stories. So the first step is to learn to adopt the same style of storytelling in business that you use in your personal life. Top sales reps are always naturally good at this. Top sales reps are also willing to share themselves as humans not supermen. Buyers are human and so many sales people feel they have to be ‘perfect’. That isn’t reality, and top sales people sense that.

You use your storytelling ability to retell the customer’s story, and then confirm - by asking - whether you’ve actually got the story right. Then, and only then, are you ready to sell, because then you can retell the customer story with a different ending or a new sequel, with your offering playing a role in the story. It’s also useful to have a quiver of “here’s how I’ve helped other people” stories, so that you can help the prospect visualize a future that includes you and your offering.


One of the skills that I’m teaching is the ability to build a 30 second version, a 3 minute version, and a 10 minute version of your stories. This requires deciding what’s essential about the story, and what’s an optional anecdote, side plot, or detail. It’s really a matter of adapting the story to the circumstances, whether it’s a formal presentation or just an informal conversation at a social gathering.
http://blogs.bnet.com/salesmachine/?p=10193&tag=nl.e808


"The rider and the elephant" as described in Made to stick
Rider is rational, Elephant is emotional. Rider can guide and train the elephant, but when emotional shook, the rider is so much larger and stronger it can easily overpower the rider.

What makes a good boss great?

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/12_things_that_good_bosses_bel.html

1. Have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.

2. My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.

3. Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.

4. One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.

5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.

6. I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.

7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.

8. One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is "what happens after people make a mistake?"

9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.

10. Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.

11. How I do things is as important as what I do.

12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.