Selling in the Age of Infobesity

Darryl Praill: How are you doing, folks? Another week here on the INSIDE Inside Sales show, Darryl Praill here. I am so thrilled that you came to join me today. I got a question for you. Where are you right now? Are you sitting at your desk, watching this stream on your favorite video player? Are you in the car? Are you running? Are you jogging? Are you just out and about? Maybe you're grocery shopping, you're listening to the INSIDE Inside Sales show. I always find that so interesting how we, as consumers of information, never seem to turn off and we take that information with us everywhere. I admit to having a slight addiction to information, to news, to research. It drives my wife absolutely bonkers. I will spend hours and hours researching the latest tool, product, process, person, technique, fad, just to have all the facts and information. Now, the upside of that is I get lots of compliments. People always say you always seem to be in- the- know what's going on. And that allows me to have lots of conversations with lots of different prospects and lots of different industry and lots of different roles and not sound I can complete an utter moron, maybe a slight moron, but not an utter moron. That's the upside. The downside of that, of course, is that I can find it to be overwhelming, confusing, conflicting, especially if you get lots of different information and this is the challenge we live as whether you're a marketer or you're a salesperson. I mean, I often think that the biggest challenge I've ever had writing an email, for example, or creating a web page or a landing page, or maybe a direct mail piece is I want to say everything, I want to give them every fact and figure and situation. I want them to be informed, but the reality is if I do that, I know they tune out and they turn off and they move on to the next gig that is more entertaining and I've lost that visitor. I got them. I had their attention. Now, it's gone. But if I don't tell them everything and ultimately, by my staff, they're going to come back to me later on and said," Well, I thought I did this or I thought I did that." And I said," No, we told you it didn't," but you were overwhelmed and you weren't listening. What's the right mix? Anybody who's ever tried explain technology to an elder relative who didn't perhaps grow up in the age of technology, understands how their eyes just glass over when they talk about the internets and the Facebook and everything else. So, there's the recurring theme you'll see here that as a salesperson, you have to manage and that is the whole concept that we have the ability to overload our target audience, our prospects with too much information. Now, sometimes, that's us doing it. We just rattle off, TLCs, I'm sorry, TLAs. TLCs, I don't know, that's a television channel, but TLAs, three- letter acronyms and buzzwords and slang like you wouldn't believe. And we each just assume everybody knows what we're talking about and often they don't. I cannot tell you how many times have five people say to me," What's an NQL? What's an SQL? That's a marketing qualified. That's a sales qualified lead." You don't know what those mean. Okay. I need to dumb it down. I'm going to step back further. And we are so familiar with this information. It's so innate to us that we don't even realize we're doing it. How many deals do you lost simply because you overwhelmed your prospect with too much information. Well, that's a real, real risk, and we don't even realize we're doing it, right? Let me ask you this, do you ever kind of do a discovery and demo all in the same meeting? And really, what it means is you're just doing the discovery as a cursory thing because your sales manager says," You need to do that." You just want to get into the demo. You can go feature some functions in a way you go and all this great stuff and five, nine availability and everything else. It's crazy. Yeah, you just want to do because that's your style but have you understand that, how you learn, how you process information. It's not necessarily how your buyer processes information. So, what do you do? I mean, there's lots of different techniques out there, schools of communication, there's different kind of identifying how they are, Myers- Briggs, Enneagram, et cetera. You can adapt you style out of that, but that's just how people are consumed data. All right. It goes back to how much can they consume and how much is too much and how much is not enough. Information overload. So, imagine my interest when my good friend, Deb Calvert says to me," Darryl, I want to talk to you about information overload. I've been doing some research and some work with some universities. And this is a real pandemic. If you will excuse the pun." And I'm like," Yes," because I experience it. So, why Deb Calvert? Well, as you may recall, last episode I shared with you all that I wanted to highlight a number of people. I wanted to highlight at least four to five people who I thought had made a profound impact in this industry. And it may be somebody that you are just not familiar with. It may not be someone who's posting 14 times a day in social media and speaks at every sales kickoff and speaks at every single function. And it is the go- to person, never says no to a speaking opportunity, because why? Because they're busy actually changing lives and impacting business. These are people whom I value. These are the people who I look at. And I am so grateful that they've had the chance to change me and my professional outlook and my techniques and my knowledge. And they've shaped me to the person I am today. These are people I value. I wanted to bring to you the people that I think just need the lights shine on them a little bit bigger and a little bit brighter because they are changing the world. That's Deb Calvert. You probably didn't know, she was one of the people behind the Sales Experts Channel, it's the number one sales resource, if you will on BrightTALK, the number one channel, but it doesn't say the Deb Calvert channel, it's the Sales Experts Channel. She's behind the scenes pulling it all together. That's what Deb is like. So, Deb, welcome to the show, my friend. I'm so glad you're here. How are you doing?

Deb Calvert: I'm good. I'm touched by your introduction. And I'm really honored to be on INSIDE Inside Sales. How'd I do?

Darryl Praill: She's now officially part of the club folks because she said it right. I like that. Talk to me about what you're doing on the information side and what was the catalyst behind this whole topic, because it is so true and you brought it up. I just started giggling because I'm like," Yes." And we've never talked about this before and it's so real.

Deb Calvert: It is, and it's everywhere and it's all the time, so much, so that it just feels like our normal natural have to state- of- being, but it's not. Hey, let me hit you with a fun fact before we dive in. So, a guessing game. Everybody at home should play along. So, in an average day, typical day, how many messages do you think you're exposed to? That includes billboards that you drive by. It includes things that you see on screen. It includes background noise, people talking. How many messages per day do you think you're exposed to?

Darryl Praill: Oh my gosh. Okay. I can do some simple math [aside. 00:08:23] So, in one hour, I probably see maybe a dozen messages or more. We'll say 25 of double it. So, on an eight- hour day, it'll be 200. Is my math, right? So, I'm going to go crazy with outside life. I'm going to say 300 if I'm really, really wrong. I apologize.

Deb Calvert: Yeah, no, your guess is very close to most people's guesses, but the actual number is 10,000. 10, 000 things that are coming to you. I mean, you can't possibly remember or even process all of them. So, you don't. Cognitive overload is real. And now, this is all exacerbated because of the increased volume of screen time. We're working at home and we're never off the device, right? You standing in line, you still got this one or something similar. And so, this is not just information overload. This is the age of info obesity. We are sick with all this information that we're trying to consume and it's not good for us. And our buyers are just like us. You can empathize with this, but if you put yourself into your buyer's shoes and think just for a moment, like what does this look like? What does this feel like? Well, it's easy. You've been a buyer, too. Buyers are overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed by the number of choices and by the sheer volume of information and that information, not just from you, but from other online sources, from your competitors. So now, that information is conflicting, it's complex, it's confusing. And that's on top of the other 9, 990 whatever other messages they're trying to process that day. So, their coping mechanism. Their coping mechanism to try to deal with all this information is to commoditize, to strip it down to something that they can wrap their head around. That's so often why they're making price- based decisions that aren't always good decisions. And it's why they ghost you after they gather the bare minimum of information, because they can't, like not won't, but can't take in anymore. So, that's the problem.

Darryl Praill: So, if I'm a sales rep, what would be some classic habits that I might be doing that are, I guess, working against my successfully achieving my goal of signing up a new customer. Am I giving them too much information? Am I not pacing myself? Am I like a fire hose? Finally, they return my phone call and I just want to go blah, as much as possible to hoping something sticks against the wall or is it the opposite that I've seen this happen too, where in our desire sometimes to parcel out the information so we can deal with it one issue at a time, one objection at a time, one requirement at a time that we don't get to certain elements and then we lose the deal. And we realized is we lost a deal because they thought we didn't do something. When we do, it just didn't come up.

Deb Calvert: Yeah. Well, the problem is all of the above, you can make a mistake on either end of that continuum, not enough, not the right information at the right time or too much all at once. What those two extremes have in common is that you are thinking of yourself, that the seller is thinking of themselves in the wrong way. They're thinking of themselves as purveyors of information. We're pacing and trying to figure out how to tell and how much to tell and telling is not the way to handle this. Telling only adds more information or frustrates the buyer because they can't sort it out because of how much you have or haven't given. So, instead of telling, what we need to be doing in selling is sense making. And sense making, if you've not ever heard that word before, it's been researched for 20, 30 years, something like that, at least in academic circles and sense making is different from telling because people already are exposed to an awful lot of information. They don't need someone to tell them the same thing or the different thing or why they think this is the more relevant thing. What they need, what we all want is just for someone to help us make sense of it all, someone who will empathize with us and understand that we are overloaded and we can only take in so much and understand so much. So, where we go wrong in selling Darryl is we do know an awful lot and we are proud of what we're selling and we know that the value of our products is something that if the customer could just hear it, they'd understand it, too. So, our enthusiasm can carry us away and we don't get to that place where we're really a true resource who's making sense of it all.

Darryl Praill: Okay. So, as I'm listening to you talk, I have a few things going through my mind and I'm just going to whip it off and you can ignore what I'm saying and carry on and educate me and the audience and what we need to do to be sense makers because most people throw me anyway, Deb. I'm just that guy. I'm listening to you. Okay. So, immediately two things going to mind. One is the importance of the discovery or qualification aspect of the sales process, so that we can filter out what are their high priorities because I'm going to assume that most people who want to make sense, the buyer wants to make sense of their challenge and their solution are trying to resolve a handful of really salient issues, just a handful of selling issues that are most important to them. So, if we don't do discovery correctly, if we rush discovery, even my opening little monologue, I thought about how many people combine discovery with demo when they really just do discovery because they really want to get to the demo. The importance of discovery is to find out what matters is you [ most 00:14:21] of that prospect, but it is a bit of an art. Most people don't understand to do it. That's the first part that went through my mind. The second part that went through my mind, and this is just timing for the audience who listens regularly. We know we had Lee Salz on recently. He has a new book called Sell Different. And I actually shared Chapter 12 of his book, which you should go buy. And his book talks about one of the most important things that most reps don't do. And it was so funny because here I am name dropping. I'm not trying to name drop again. We got Deb, we got Lee. Victor Antonio did a LinkedIn review and he said he loved Chapter 12 and Chapter 13, and Chapter 12 is the one I share with my rep. Chapter 12 is all about the recap email, because you can have a conversation that's an hour long. The recap email says," Okay, this is what I heard you said were your key issues. Just recap. Bing, Bing, Bing. These are your next steps, A, B, C. These are my next steps, 1, 2, 3. Did I miss anything? Send." So, they distill that one hour into very clear bite size content so we can move the process forward, which is a lot less overwhelming than me trying to go," Oh my gosh, that was an hour of information overload. Where do I go from here?" So, those are the two reactions I went to was discovery and recap email. Am I right? Am I barking up the wrong tree? What have I forgotten? You tell me.

Deb Calvert: Yeah. You're you are right, completely right. And the other piece, this should belong in every discovery. It's not just about what do you value and why. It's about what are you considering. What do you already know? What do you still need to know? How can I be a resource, too, to help you put these pieces together? So, we used to call it consultative selling. We would have the conversations about the competitor and our competitor's products not to bash them, but to be the resource who helps the customer filter that information. Well, we never called it by that name, but that was sense making and we've kind of lost it along the way, but it's a matter of pausing long enough to let the customer reflect on what they do know, what they don't know, what they need to know. And to give them that opportunity to ask us questions and to show that we can help them figure out all those pieces. We're not going to give them response that's the blah blah, information dump, right? We're going to keep it narrow and really listen closely to what they're asking, so that the answer we give is just that not our next opening to pile on all the things that we want them to know. So, there's a measure of empathy and putting yourself in the customer's shoes that would give you that opening, that ability to more easily do that.

Darryl Praill: Okay. So, as I listen to you, you said you make a bite size. That's the word you used and we're just going to listen. I heard you say that, too. Okay, reps, how many of you, I mean, I'm not judging you because I'm guilty of this. Ask my wife, she'll tell you. How many of you are guilty of not truly actively listening? Or if you're listening, you're listening for that pause, so you can jump in and keep on doing information overload, right? You're not even really hearing what they're saying. You just know what you want to say next. You hear Deb said,"No, you got to act and listen. You got to partial it out," which is patience. How many of you suck at being patient? And by the way, it's a human frailty. Again, no judgment, but I always talk about being self aware. If you know, you suck at that, you need to practice that because the Deb's point, people just want to make sense and you want to avoid the information overload, the info obesity, I love that term. But here's what I was thinking when you said that, I have been on many discovery call and my prospect is a verbal thinker. So, they need to go on and on and on and on and on as they kind of get the head around what they're really trying to get at. So, in some regards, they've overloaded me with information and if I cut them off at any point in time, I never get to the end of that process, which is really where they're finally going to end up. And what they said that started that, sort of inaudible was just them processing, hearing themselves say it. But two minutes later, three minutes later, where they finally finished their dialogue, then they get to their point. So, we have buyers who are verbal thinkers and we need to be patient and listen and wait to the end point and take just those salient points. That's half my question for you, Deb, which is," Am I right? Am I wrong?" Second point though is I see too many sales reps. I have visuals in my head of the people on my team. The sales reps on my team who are verbal processors and they need to do the exact same thing except what they don't realize is that when they're doing verbal thinking out loud, the prospect doesn't know they're verbal thinking and they're just taking it all in and they're going," Where are we going on this little meandering journey? And oh my gosh, I don't know. Where do I go with this information? What do I take away?" So, two- part question. How do I manage myself if I'm a verbal thinker to overcome that? And B, how do I know if my prospect is a verbal thinker and I need to wait until the end?

Deb Calvert: Okay. So, let's take the prospect is a verbal thinker first or just a talker. Sometimes, people aren't even thinking, they're just talking. Either way, what you want to do as a discipline to make sure that you're not checking out and letting your mind wander, because you certainly think faster than they talk even if they're fast talking. The way that you manage that is that you adopt the discipline that I call listening for what's different. See, what we usually do is we listen for what's familiar, for what's actionable that's when we ponce for what sounds like a green light. We listen for the things we want to hear and that we're comfortable with. But if we go into conversations with buyers or with anyone, focused on I'm going to listen for what's different, it makes your brain, it literally trains your brain not to go down those other paths. Listening for what's different includes when they have a hesitance or when they start talking faster, you can tell they're really excited about something. It's how they're saying it, not just what they're saying that's different. And you will pick up, I mean, this is part of emotional intelligence. You will pick up so much more and you will be so much better connected with that person as you do this kind of listening. All right. Well, what if this is you? What if you're either just the verbal thinker, Darryl's nice term, or you're just a talker and I get it. Some of us do, that's how we connect. That's how we present. If that's the case, try to discipline yourself to do headlines. Okay. Give me a moment. I want to do some processing and make sure I get everything correct. Let's talk about Feature A, okay. Now, you've disciplined yourself. You can now talk because you said the point of what you're doing. The buyer knows where you're going. It doesn't feel like some random cascade of information they don't know what to do with, and if you can at all, take some breaths. Give yourself a time limit. Okay, I'm going to say five sentences. I'm going to talk for 20 seconds. Whatever you think you can manage without it looking ridiculous to pause and say, at least, what you're saying in this conversation very well. Did I get that right? Let me hear your reaction. What have I missed? The check- ins, that's two- way dialogue instead of a fire hose of sometimes meaningless information going at people. So, it's okay to be either one, the seller or the buyer who has that habit, but either side of it that you can do better communicating, if you think about inserting these little disciplines.

Darryl Praill: I'm going to share something that I do folks, and I'm not saying you need to do it. This works for me. And I guess, I didn't connect it to information overload until we just had this conversation today, but I know I do it and I know I'm intentional about it. And I know it's because when we have conversations, a lot of information get shared. You may have noticed this in my podcast. I do this in my webinars. I do this in a lot of my phone calls. I am fairly frequently repeating key themes, recapping. So, if my buyer, my prospect is verbal talking or giving a long dialogue and I will recap say," Okay, so what I heard you say was A, B and C." You talked about a lot, but A, B and C were the most important. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, great. So then, I'll give my answer and then I'll say,"I can now to repeat," even though I give you all this information, you said A, B and C, and I said X, Y, and Z in response to A, B and C. That's in the essence, A X, B, Y, C, Z. Are we in alignment on that? Yes. So, even in my podcast interviews, I'll often come back near the end, especially say, remember, this is how we started. These were the issues. This is the solution. This is what you do next. Again, the recap email, I'm always constantly recapping because it creates clarity and actionable takeaways or insights or next steps. I do that because I can be a verbal thinker and it's the only way I've learned to ensure that the person I'm in conversation with heard what I heard and agrees on the takeaways, and that doesn't always work, but it works better than never doing it at all. That's what I do. Have you seen in your studies with the universities and whatnot, any kind of tips and tricks to make sense, to be a sense maker?

Deb Calvert: Yeah. Well, you're talking about one of them, which is connect the dots. Connecting the dots is a form, a subset if you will, of sense making. It helps people make sense and to see connections between disparate pieces of information left to their own devices, even if it were really obvious to you and you didn't do that left to their own devices, the average person won't know that X was supposed to be about A. They just thought it was you doing sales work. You've got to put the pieces together and put this in manageable chunks, connect those dots in ways that are very clearly connected. Otherwise, it's too easy to default to, well, what's the price, or how fast can they do it or some other cheap replacement criteria that isn't so much about value because when you're expressing value, the value gets true because it makes sense, and that's our job. In selling, our job is to make sure the value that's inherent in our product or in our solution is clear to the client. And then we're creating value too, because we're this resource. We're sense making, we're helping them to pull those pieces together in ways that they didn't quite get to on their own.

Darryl Praill: There's a number of takeaways here. As I start to recap, normally, I'm taking notes and this time, I've not been taking notes because I've been so engrossed in the conversation. So, sales tactic, number one, make sure you take good notes. And if not, go back to the recording. Hopefully, you recorded it and then take the notes. Do that before sending your recap email, by the way, in fact, one of the techniques I've seen done well is where they'll say," We talked about issue A, B and C," and then they'll give me little clips from the recording, 30 seconds, 45 seconds to play it back. And what's really powerful about that Total Sidebar while we're here is usually they'll CC, the economic decision maker or somebody else in the buying committee that wasn't involved in those meetings. So now, they can just listen to recording one, two and three. And then in five minutes, have the highlights of what you just talked about for an hour. So, Total Sidebar, that's a really cool thing to do to make sure the whole buying committee's involved on the key selling points. But if I heard you're right, we need to be aware that there's a lot of information overload going on, info obesity, and all we want, we want to be sense makers. To do that, we do not pile on information. Rather, what we do is we do a constant, how do I put this? We hit the headlines. We do proper discovery. We listen for what's different. And then, we take note of that. We practice our own patients. We make sure we have clarity about what we want to say. We accept that we cannot say everything that we want to say, but if discovery is done proper, then that gives us the focus we need to only speak to because if you do your job right, that meeting leads to a second meeting, leads to a third meeting where you can then get deeper and deeper. You don't need to hit a home run on the first meeting. A single is fine. And then, the power of the recap is really powerful. I know I've missed a lot, but I do know that we do suffer from information overload. I had no idea it was 10, 000 plus messages every single day, and you can see why with that much... I sound like a broken record, that much information overload that each of us incur, each of us, that we're just looking for the highlights. What's the highlights? So, what's my next step? Dumb this down. Make this easy for me. If you are a rep who doesn't know your product or your services very well, your natural tendency is to throw everything against the wall. A, that's bad selling. B, that communication style, it just lends to the problem and will not work for you. Some of the simplest things you can do, believe it or not, is actually use scripts. Scripts, they don't need to be verbatim scripts, say this like a robot. Scripts are often just reminders, talking points that you want to drill down on. The second thing is you want to be a very good note taker, so that you can, I think, discern the key takeaways from that call. So that, on the next call," We haven't talked about this." On the next call, you say," I just want to spend five minutes recapping what our last call brought to light. You said ABC. Again, it's your recap email. This is your action item. This is my action item. Did I miss anything? That's where we're at. We're going to line it. Great. Let's carry on from there." Because chances are, if they've gotten 10,000 messages a day and it's been a week since you've talked, that's 70, 000 messages, plus just their daily routine, they have largely forgotten the nuances and the subtleties and the importance of the key conversations you already had. So, framing the conversation does a great way to focus the conversation. I've rattled on too long. How did I do though? What did I miss, deb?

Deb Calvert: You got most of them. Empathy's a big part of it. So, as you're listening and you're doing that listening for what's different, that's where your empathy kicks in. Break it down into manageable chunks. One idea at a time. And remember that you've heard this a million times in selling. Your features are meaningless unless somebody can understand why it matters to them. So, sense making, you start with them and put all the pieces together, connect those dots.

Darryl Praill: And one of the things that Deb made here was she meant the reference of this is Consultative Selling, which is something that's been going on for decades and decades, but we forget that. And the reality is part of this conversation is you are educating them, too. I'll give you an example, simple example if this makes any sense. I will have many sales leaders talk to me here at VanillaSoft. and I'll say to them, listen, your reps, they need to physically action every touch. There's an email, a phone call, an SMS. It comes up on the screen. They need to do something with it. Phone call to push a button, dial to click. And they'll now click the dial or whatever, hit a button, drop a voicemail. Email, up comes the template. You personalize it. So, on SMS, up comes the template. You personalize it, click a button. And the reaction I get over and over again is, wait a minute. My reps have to click a button on the SMSs and on the emails, like I don't have time. I don't want my reps doing that. That's stupid. The whole point of the sales engagement is to go on velocity and go fast and lots of activity. And if they're doing that, then they're not selling. They're just operators at that point in time. I want them selling. I don't want them touching emails or SMSs. And I'm like," Really?" So, you don't want them personalizing everyone to make sure each email, each conversation is relevant, contextual, impactful, personal, so that you have a high conversion rate. Instead, you want to spam them. Not everybody likes when I say that. That's okay, that sparks the conversation. And if that's not what they're looking for, then they're gone. They're not a fit for my product. That's okay, too. Part of the conversation is to disqualify them as much it is to qualify them. And it's also an agenda to make sure they understand consultative selling. But now that you've got these key points, off you can go. They can hammer it over and over again. Anyway, I am wandering now, Deb, I'm sorry. I wanted to share that little story, but it is consultative. It is educational. It is that back and forth. It is highlights. It is empathy. It is listening for what's different. It is being intentional. We could go on. Deb, what's the best way for these folks to get to know you better?

Deb Calvert: Oh, find me on LinkedIn or come over to my website, peoplefirstps. com. Come over to the Leadership Academy, peoplefirstpotential. com. Email me, we can talk in person, whatever fits your style. Well, I would love to follow up and have more conversation. Go by discover questions, if you heard some stuff here about questions and wish you were doing more and better with those, that's a handy little resource. So, yeah, let's do get acquaint and somehow though.

Darryl Praill: Let's do, get acquaint. You've been given permission folks. Deb Calvert, she's one of my top three favorite people in this industry. She's real. She's genuine. She's smart as hell. Check her out. I love her. I think she's great. I hope you do, too. In the meantime, if you love last week's session and you like this week's session, we're doing it again next week. My favorite, who's who? The people you need to know better. Hope you enjoyed this show. Share it with your team. I bet you, it will spark some good conversations. In the meantime, tone back that information overload. Take the headphones out. Look around you. It's a change of the seasons. Leaves are change in color. It's a dynamite time of the year. My name is Darryl and this, my friends, is the INSIDE Inside Sales Show.