Charlie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the next episode of what the three, the show where we talk about emerging technology startups and give them a lift from zero to one and give them the right track to get them from zero experience to actually running a business. This episode, we’re talking to Ross McKenzie. He will open and talk about his remarkable journey from dropout to session musician, to running a billion dollar sales organization, your diverse experiences from being a sweeper up of animal bites to in an abattoir to self taught computer programmer and beyond are not just unique, but actually incredibly inspiring, um, as the co founder of value mentor.
You have shown clients how to synthesize their product sales and value messages into compelling value propositions. We’d love to delve into your passion for sales excellence and your, and essentially your experiences in the high pressure world of corporate [00:01:00] sales. Um, we also run a company called value mentor.
So professional sales performance program, it lasts eight weeks and you’ve trained people from Google uni credits all the way straight through down to charities. And I think some of the case studies reign in about a 24, 000 percent return on investment. So thank you for being with us here today. And, um, you know, we’d love to hear a little bit more about yourself and your life and, and how things have gone recently.
Ross: Before we get started, is it, are you sure that the, uh, the check is in the post? Charlie, if you, have you done that? Oh yeah.
Charlie: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s definitely there.
Ross: Okay. No, thank you. Thank you for the introduction. So where would you like to start?
Charlie: Well, we have some. Some thoughts, but I remember one of the most interesting stories that we talked about in terms of the use of language was, uh, the 15 K every time you pee.
And I recall that story, um, often [00:02:00] whenever I’m in a sales call.
Ross: We, we, we, we can’t, we can’t use that, Charlie. That’s a terrible story to use. We can’t possibly use that one.
Charlie: Why can’t we use that one, Rob?
Ross: Because it’s terrible. I’m ashamed of it. I’m, uh, I’m deeply proud and ashamed.
Thomas: But you got to keep in mind that a lot of our founders and the people that will listen to this podcast, uh, love these kinds of stories that, uh, make you both deeply ashamed and deeply proud?
Ross: Well, um, it was, uh, it, It’s certainly for me, it’s been a once in a lifetime. You know, I, I don’t, I can’t see another one like this happening again because it just sort of, uh, materialized out the universe. And what it was, was I was working with a company that had a really, really clever piece of software that sniffed out Redundant network based assets and was able to show the people that own those assets, either how much money they were making them or [00:03:00] how much money it was costing them.
And usually it was an issue of cost because they would have something out there that maybe had a duty cycle that was said that it should be used 20 hours a day and it was being used for 15 minutes and they spent 20, 000 pounds on it. I mean, that’s a terrible investment. So this guy’s software would go out and have a look for that stuff.
So he had this prospect, and this prospect had multiple sites, and, um, each site was, um, pretty much identical. So he did an audit of the first site, and he identified at least 15 million dollars, sorry, 15 million pounds worth of savings every year. Right. Multiply that by a number of different sites. And so he was speaking to the top man and the top man loved it.
He thought it was absolutely fantastic, but, uh, he just said, not now, not now, not now, not now. And the guy obviously was quite perplexed as you would be, because you think in my life, there’s four sites at 60 million a year. I can save you for, you [00:04:00] you know, a very, very small investment. Why wouldn’t you do this?
Um, so he said, look, you know, I’m stuck here. Can you help me out? And I said, well, if I can, I I’d be delighted. So we arranged to meet this guy for dinner and we got chatting away. And the crux of it was, 15 million pounds a year times four or whatever it was, was a drop in the ocean compared to the other problems that he had.
He had far bigger, more pressing, more expensive problems. And whilst he would probably get around to it, one day he had bigger things that he had to address. And so it really wasn’t on his radar. So how do you think you’d get around that?
Charlie: I don’t know. I would probably ask him what the other problems were, see if there was an opportunity there, and then potentially work.
A larger solution with partners to address what he was Well, his issues were,
Ross: well, that’s, that sounds very professional. [00:05:00] Um, that sounds like something a proper salesperson would do who had, um, you know, a lot of experience and, and, uh, a very, very ethical way of engaging with the clients, um, that’s not quite what we did.
Um, what we did was we changed the subject completely. And so he and I were of a similar age and, uh, Pete had, the better part of a liter of mineral water and said, listen, I have to excuse myself for a moment, pay a visit to the gentleman’s facilities. And I said, yeah, okay, that’s fine. I said, actually I need to go as well.
I’ll come with you. So we were standing there having the, the men at a urinal conversation and, uh, men of a certain age, very often they’ll say, say, Oh, have you got to this stage, Bob, where you’ve got to get up in the middle of the night to go for one of these. And he said, Ross. I gotta get up for two. And I saw, God, it’s terrible, isn’t it?
And he said, oh, she’s, you know, you get one at 1. 30 and it takes you [00:06:00] until 2. 15 to go back to sleep. You get another one at quarter to five and it takes you another half hour. And, you know, if I could get it done, it just drives me nuts. I don’t know. I know I’m only at one right now, but you know, you’ve probably got 10 years on me, all that kind of stupid, stupid conversation.
So we went back to the table and we had a chat and whatever. And as the evening came to a close, I scribbled some notes on a piece of paper and, um, and, uh, he said, what are you doing? I said, well, I just, uh, you know, Um, I’m just playing around with some numbers because it’s a bit of fun. We all like a bit of fun with numbers, don’t we?
And he said, yeah, what are you doing? And I said, well, I’ve just worked out that if you do two P’s a night, you probably do another five or six during the day. So let’s say you do eight a day. That’s eight times seven. That’s 56 times 52. If we divide all the money that you can save by implementing this solution and divide it by the number of pisses that you take, do you realize that It’s [00:07:00] costing you 50, 15, 000 bucks every time you take a leak.
And he laughed. He thought it was really funny. And, uh, I said, it is funny, but I said, I’m going to do something really nasty. Now I’m going to remind you that when you get up tomorrow morning now, like five hours from now at one 30 in the morning, you’re going to stand there. You’re going to remember this conversation.
And you’re going to go, that’s 15, 000 bucks down there. And then a quarter to five, you’re going to do it again. And I pretty much guarantee you won’t get back to sleep a quarter to five. So he swore at me. We had a laugh and, uh, it, no, it was fun. You know, it was, it was a silly, stupid, stupid conversation.
Well, anyway, he said, thanks very much. And, uh, I really love the product. I think it’s great. We’ll get around to it one day. We just left it. Two weeks later, I got a call from the guy I was working with and he said, you’re not going to believe this. He’s just said, In order to get some sleep, I’ve [00:08:00] signed off an appeal.
Get the quotes in. We’ll do the first site right now. And if you ever see that guy again, tell him I’m going to punch his lights out. So here, here’s the thing. Um, there’s, there’s a key to every sale. There’s always, there’s a key to every door kind of thing. And with this guy. He did have very, very major business issues that he needed to address.
And this particular one was very trivial by comparison, but it’s one he could have solved in an instant. All he had to do is sign a P. O. to solve this problem. Um, but it wasn’t big enough to bother him, but it’s a little bit like the only mosquito in your room when you’re on holiday. If it’s going around and it’s bugging you all the time, You just want to slap the thing and get rid of it.
And that’s what he decided to do with it. And it was just a little game, but it shows how powerful, um, it can be to introduce something into a [00:09:00] dialogue that reminds people of a conversation. And it won’t let them go. It’s called an anchor in NLP terms. So effectively, we set an anchor that every time he was going to go for a visit to the toilet, then he was going to remind himself that it was 15, 000.
And, you know, it’s like, Daddy, can I have an ice cream? Daddy, can I have an ice cream? Daddy, eventually the kid’s going to get an ice cream.
Thomas: Yeah.
Ross: So, We got an ice cream
Thomas: worth of 60 million.
Ross: Well, he got a 60 million back, which is
Thomas: good. Yeah. That’s, that’s an absolutely amazing story. And I think it’s, I’m curious to hear like you anchored, sold it.
What was their follow up after this? Was there, was there more business done with this specific client afterwards? Or was it just this piece?
Ross: Well, this was the piece that I was involved in. I went in to help out a friend. Right. I, this, this guy I believed in, he had, he was super at what he did. He was, [00:10:00] uh, um, he ended up doing a brilliant job for this business and of course they came back and did some more.
Um, but
when, when you’ve, when you manage to operate at that kind of a level with people, um, see there’s a story that he and this guy can talk about forever. right? They’ll laugh about it. When they’re 85 years old, they’ll remember and they’ll tell about it. They’ll tell their friends about it. Um, and it’s, it’s one of those things that binds people in an interesting way.
Um, so yes, you got a lot of business out of it, but selling is is a people business. And if you want to sell high value stuff, if you want to make that transition from being, um, a vendor to a trusted advisor, then it’s a human to human thing. And if you know how to play that game, [00:11:00] because it is a form of a game, and you know the principles upon which people work, then you’ll be able to do it over and over and over again.
And it’s It’s a wonderful skill to be able to learn.
Thomas: I fully agree on that. Um, I have a large background in healthcare, uh, before I transitioned into project management in tech and tech in general and healthcare, obviously social healthcare. So it’s all based on trust. And I took that with me towards the organizations that I’ve worked with and collaborate with, and later on to my clients and to the sales.
And as you said, Uh, and I made that joke earlier, uh, you know, everything gets slowly more virtual, but it’s the, the, the trust and the credit you build up. In face to face conversations and the anchors that you kind of set in those conversations in those meetings where people will remember you by, um, to a point where I can call up one of my previous colleagues in health care, and we can still laugh about [00:12:00] some of these things that happened that were very stressful, but in the end, we’re very had a very positive outcome, and it’s because it anchored.
I think it was a milestone in our relationship, and on that piece, you. Can build forward because now there’s also trust. There is something positive. And that’s where the next step is. Sometimes there is no next step, but if there is that next step, there is always something to talk about. Oh, remember that time when.
Ross: Oh, absolutely. If, if you’re able to, if there’s an actual conclusion to a relationship or, um, an engagement, if you can leave with grace, um, the door will always be open. And people very often remember a graceful exit as much as they remember the dynamic and amazing entrance. So yeah, I think that that sounds really, really good, Thomas.
I like that. May I just pop in a thought here [00:13:00] on the virtual thing? Um, now this is, this is somebody, I have been working in IT related sales. Since 1981,
there’s been a lot of change, as you can imagine. Yeah. Um, but some things don’t change. And just a, a, a metaphor for selling technology and, uh, engaging with clients in the modern and virtual worlds is, uh, I used to take guitar lessons with a guy called Rob Bura. B O U R A S S A. He works out of Wyandotte Mission Good, and Rob is a stunning teacher.
And Rob teaches shredders and big name guitar players and all the rest of it. And he shared with me that one of the things that amazed him was that even though these people were amazing, um, technicians on the guitar, very [00:14:00] incredibly dexterous and very quick and very impressive. They had no idea how a song was formed and they didn’t know about music.
And so if he asked them to, to pick out Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on their guitar, they couldn’t do it. With all of the skill they had, they couldn’t do it because they didn’t understand the relationship between the notes. They didn’t understand the fundamentals. And the stuff that we’re going to be talking about here is exactly the same way.
Is that in the virtual world, you could go out, you know, there’s a million great channels on YouTube that’ll tell you all about selling at the highest level. But there are certain principles that need to be addressed before any of that works, because you’ll find yourself caught in a situation. You go, wow, that wasn’t in the manual.
Yep. You know, so, you know, I’m a great believer that part of what we do in Value Mentor is it would be easy just to shove a course at people and say, read this, listen to that, practice that. But the whole point about mentorship, it [00:15:00] is, let me take your hand and show you the movement. Now, let me guide your pencil to show you the stroke with the pencil.
It’s an engagement that allows you to somatically transfer things to people so they get, I don’t know, you could call it an embodied understanding rather than a theoretical or intellectual understanding. And another example of an embodied understanding is, you know, once you know how to ride a bike. You know how to ride a bike.
It’s not, you don’t know how to ride a bike intellectually. You know how to ride a bike somatically. And that’s what I love to see in really good sales people where is they’re doing it from a place of deep understanding. Does that make sense?
Thomas: I would say that, uh, and coming again, coming off and I am not a sales person, although I think a lot of people would call me a salesperson and That said, uh, being in project management for a [00:16:00] long time and business development, you always sell them no matter what you do, you always sell.
And I’m very well aware of that. Um, and I found that, as you said, that embodied understandment of why you do it and how you do it also allows you to become more creative and, and, and. Bring in narrative and storytelling within your sales, right? So it adds more, it’s not, even if you have an understanding, it sometimes can feel still feel as a playbook, uh, where I think when you’re really good at something, um, and let’s say this is selling.
It feels as you are believing in it and you’re passionate about it. And I truly believe that passion always sells, right? Like you have salespeople that just sell for commissions and you have people that sell for, uh, also for commission, but you won’t feel it because there is such a strong passion and storytelling behind it.
You almost forget what they’re selling. Um, because it’s such an, an, an deep, uh, [00:17:00] fulfilling conversation that you’re like, yeah, I want to work with this person. I want to take his product. I want to understand. Why this person is so deeply passionate about. What he is selling. Right. And that’s always what I find so interesting, um, because it always comes back to what you say, the embodiment, and then I think the story that the passion around it, that allows you to come creative.
And I think at storytelling to what you do.
Ross: Sure. So when, when you’re describing that sort of, um, relationship between a seller and a potential buyer, where they start to engage in real meaningful conversation, what do you suppose is happening there?
Thomas: I would say a relationship is formed. right, or is forming.
Um, and, and it’s a base of potential trust is established.
Ross: Yeah. Okay. So if you were selling me [00:18:00] something, um,
let’s say we have our very first conversation and you’ve got something that I’m really interested in. I think it might be able to help me, but I’m not sure about it. Um, what do you think the most powerful thing you can give me is in our first conversation?
Thomas: That’s a very, very interesting question. And I would say, well, there’s, there’s two things potentially, and I’m looking just at, at also the clients that we, that I work with in our industry.
Um, let’s say you would be one of those clients. It would be the power of no, I don’t think you are. What you want to build or what you want to buy is maybe we might not be the right people. Just, I think the transparency and the honesty, um, but also an intricate understanding of what the client actually, why it actually, uh, why they actually need it instead of, Oh, you want to build it by this product.
I will, I will sell you this [00:19:00] product. I think it’s the understanding of why they need the product is far more important than selling the product in and of itself.
Ross: Is there anything that you’d add to that, Charlie?
Charlie: Well, I think exactly what you said. You need to give them an experience. So two things. One is I believe as a salesperson, if you believe in the product, your, your natural mannerisms, the way you come across your body language, the tonality of your voice, if you know that what you’re selling is actually what you’re Are you going to save some money or make them more, give them better health?
Or what are the three reasons people use technology, right? More money, better health, or more relationships or something to that effect. If you know that what you’re selling is going to deliver one of those three things that they want, you’re, you’re naturally going to be, I think a little more nonchalant because it is not you, it’s the next person.
So I just need to get onto the call with the next person. So there’s something in that confidence. And that people naturally feel, I think also there’s, you, you then aren’t [00:20:00] sort of desperate for the cell. You’re not leaning into the call too much or kind of you’re sitting back going, well, do you want it or not?
Um, I mean, I think that’s natural. I think people can sense that on people when they’re having a conversation. And then it’s, as long as the message is clear, like, do I understand that this is something I need? You don’t want to work with someone who doesn’t. Need your product and is going to end up an unhappy customer.
You want to work with someone who actually wants what you have are going to be an ideal client, potentially a case study, and. I’m going to be delighted at the fact that they’ve worked with you because working with an unhappy client costs more money than it’s worth normally.
Ross: I’m going to give you two and a half out of three for the answer.
Because all of that was good stuff. And the remaining 0. 5, uh, was touched upon, but not expanded upon. But I think when you hear it, you’ll recognize it right away because we sometimes take it for granted. [00:21:00] Um, so Thomas, you talked about. the style and the emotional involvement of the engagement, the transparency, being honest and candid and being willing to say, no, if I’m not right, I will go.
Um, putting the enthusiasm in and Charlie, you were talking about making sure the fit was right and all the rest of it. The other 0. 5, which is maybe a little bit bigger than just 0. 5 is I’d be looking for you to help me create an experience for myself of what it’s going to be like to be your customer.
Okay. Um, now Charlie and I have talked about this in the past and this is where we get into this realm of this thing called the outcome of the outcome. And if the people watching this and living, uh, listening to this, get nothing out of this. Please take this away. If you get your head around this, everything will change.
The outcome of the outcome is [00:22:00] what becomes possible for somebody once they become your client. What things become available that aren’t available now? What becomes joyous that’s not joyous now? So if Thomas and I decided we were going to go skiing and we went to a travel agent, And we saw these fantastic pictures on the walls of this travel agent.
This is a proper travel agent. It’s a shop with people in it rather than browsing pictures online. Although the same thing applies is we go in and we look at all of these things and go, Oh, look at there’s Valdezere. Oh, look there, Les Deux Alpes. Oh, look at the skies. Look at all these lifts and there’s nobody there.
18 inches of fresh powder. We go in and we, they say, so, so when. What do you want? You know, we want a skiing holiday. We want our lift passes included. We want ski hire and boots. We want insurance. We want, uh, all our meals included. We want drinks included. We want, uh, ski lessons. We want some [00:23:00] apres ski. We want all this.
And so they, they put this thing together for us. We get all excited and we get our credit cards down. We go, yeehaw. And then we spend 18 gazillion euros and we go away and really happy. And we get an email. And we open up the email, we print it off, and what we have, what we’ve just bought is a bunch of vouchers.
We’ve bought a voucher to turn up at the airport and stand in a line of people to go through security, check in our bags, to jump in a great big tube full of other people going to the same place, a voucher to get on a bus, a voucher to go to a hotel, which is just a big box of rooms, a voucher for some stuff to shove in our face.
That’s not what we thought we’ve bought. We’ve bought an experience that hasn’t happened yet. We’ve bought the outcome of the outcome. We bought blue skies. We bought fresh powder. We bought making new friendships, having a great laugh. And so the outcome of the outcome is what drives people to [00:24:00] say yes.
Okay. The outcome of the outcome with the 15, 000 per P was not buying a piece of software to sniff out assets. It was, I want a good night’s sleep. If I scratch this itch, I will sleep better. And so when you’re having your conversation with your customers and they sense your interest. enthusiasm and your integrity and your commitment to doing a good job.
And then you add into that the part of the conversation that says, so Thomas, once all this is up and it’s singing and it’s absolutely in place and you’re happy with it, what are you going to do next? What will become possible for you as a business that’s not possible now? And then they’ll tell you, and that is the reason that they’re buying from you.
Not because you have an interesting widget or a shiny gong. They don’t care about those things. They care about the outcome of the outcome.
Thomas: This is so [00:25:00] powerful if you look at selling software. Cause people don’t buy software. They buy a product that they can ship to their end users, make their end users happy, get, get sales, et cetera, et cetera.
And it’s what I always found interesting. And that’s one of the reasons why Charlie and I worked together with. Within what the three and our companies, um, it’s because we don’t look at like, okay, we’ll sell you a piece of software and you’ll be happy with it. No, we look at like, what happens if we sell you this, right?
Like we’re not selling you a piece of software and then you’ll be a happy client. No, we’re, we’re helping you build your company and the risk. If you, your future, you know, if you’re from zero to one from one 200, we would say, um, and by, by, and how we do that, we give you a team, we help you grow your product.
So you don’t need to worry about that product, but you can actually get that to your clients. So the outcome of what we do is not, um, you know, we just had a successful sale. No, the outcome of what we do is our client now can go to market with, [00:26:00] you know, a really relaxed, you know, It’s a mindset where he said, like, I worked with professionals that handled the pieces that I don’t know.
And I know if I go to market and I will go to market, they are able, like I will be able to sell this product and my customers will be happy. And that’s where I care about. That’s the outcome of the outcome. I think in this example.
Ross: Yup. Can I give you 2. 75 out of three for that one?
Thomas: Um,
Ross: because this is all really good and, and you’ll have to forgive me, um, for being pedantic on this.
Um, I, I love this stuff deeply because it has rewarded me hugely over the years. And it’s really simple once you remember to do it. So for, in the example that you just gave me there, which is the remaining 0. 25 is the part of the dialogue with a client where you say, now that you’ve got this out there in the marketplace, what are you going to notice now?
And let’s say we’re going to reduce [00:27:00] our sales engagement times, our lead times to order by three months. Oh, that’s interesting. What’s your average order value? A hundred thousand dollars three months early. So we can say that’s around about 30, 000 bucks. in this calendar year that might have drifted into next calendar year.
And how many times might you do that? Well, we would do that maybe three or four times. Well, there’s 120, 000 bucks in this calendar year that wasn’t going to be. Wow. What do you suppose you might do with that additional 120 K? Well, we’d probably invest in a new PM to allow us to deliver or we’d invest in another salesperson.
They’re now telling you what they want for the future. They’re going to the outcome of the outcome of the outcome, right? And they won’t be having that conversation with anybody else. When they tell you that, If they say potentially there’s 120, 000 bucks that we can bring into this fiscal in terms of real cash, which is a really important thing for a [00:28:00] small business, they can’t go back on that because they gave you that number, right?
So you might say, do you know what, with that additional 120, 000, if you invested 60, 000, we could probably turn that 120 into 250. So do you think it would be worth investing 60, 000 that comes in this year now to get the 250 now? What do you think they might say?
Because it’s their data and they’ve told you what the numbers are, you’re not making this stuff up. You’re just using their information and their data in a meaningful way that allows you to show them opportunities that exist for them in the form of an outcome of the outcome that they’re not aware of yet.
And what do you suppose that does to your reputation in their eyes?
Thomas: Yeah, that, that goes up a hundred percent, 200 percent easily. And, and that’s, that’s, That’s [00:29:00] where your recommendations come from as a business, right, as a small business that sells.
Ross: Oh, absolutely. Well, when you have, when you’re having that type of good conversation and your competitors aren’t, aren’t part of that, they won’t be part of that.
What they’ll be doing is they’ll be looking for an invitation to tender to come out that they can respond to, to go in with a low ball price and hope that get one in five. Um, you’re writing the tender and you become a trusted partner and they’re vendors. And of course, the difference between a vendor and a trusted partner is a vendor is an interchangeable commodity.
If vendor A isn’t available, they’ll just buy from vendor B. Whereas if you’re engaging at outcome of the outcome level as a trusted advisor, if you ask the client, you know, Hey, what would you do if Thomas wasn’t around right now? They go, Oh God, no, no, no, no. They don’t even want to think about that.[00:30:00]
You’re not a vendor anymore.
Thomas: You become a partner.
Ross: It’s so exciting. Yeah. You know, it, it transforms relationships.
Charlie: So I wanted to dip in here and, and have a look at sort of the, I mean, we’ve already kind of launched into it naturally, the 10 pieces of advice for startups, sort of the core component of the, of the pod.
Um, we’ve looked at focus on outcomes. Um, we’re going to walk through power of storytelling and sales, detaching from biases, a wow factor in initial interactions. Perceived value and competitive landscape, psychology of human behavior and aligning value propositions and customer needs. I think we’ve, we’ve nailed outcomes.
Um, where would you say, and if you’ve got any anecdotes here as well, the power of storytelling and sales comes from when you’re, and I think we just gave a great, given a great example of it, but, [00:31:00]
Ross: uh, well, there’s different kinds of stories you can tell. I mean, I mean the story about, um, 15 K per P or, um, outcome of the outcome going to a travel agent.
That’s one thing, but, um, the, the real power in storytelling when you’re working with clients in and out, day in and out, um, It’s being able to create an avatar of them and use them as the subject of a story,
Charlie: right?
Ross: So you may recall that I told you, uh, a story of a guy called Paul and Paul had been promoted from sales manager to sales director of a big UK company.
Um, and one of Paul’s biggest challenges was that, um, his old job wouldn’t let go of him. All of his salespeople wanted to keep coming back to him and ask him advice for. What they should do in this deal. And clients kept phoning him up about, can you help me [00:32:00] with this and help me with that. And he just couldn’t leave his past behind.
And of course that, that led to a number of problems. One was that he became visible at the senior level that appointed him. And they were beginning to ask questions as to whether he was actually cut out for a role of this size, if he kept being dragged back to his old job and he hadn’t worked out how to stop that.
Um, So that was one problem. Second one, it was, it was just exhausting him. And the third issue was, you know, it just wasn’t fair. He’d worked so hard to get there and now it all was at risk because he wanted to do the right thing by everybody. So, you know, what, what does he do? Well, as luck would have it, he met somebody who, had been in a similar sort of situation.
And he, he said, well, you know, I did this. I found that this worked for me. I found that this didn’t work for me. And, you know, if, if here’s the plan, this is what you do. And if you do these things, you’ll probably notice that these things happen. But if you don’t notice them, you’ll probably notice that it goes the other way.
So you kind of have to make a [00:33:00] decision as to whether you’re going to take some action or whether you’re just going to wait and see what happens and die a slow death. Oh, yeah. Right. So what happened to this guy? Well, he, he took the action. It was a bit tough, but he made the decision. He did the things that were recommended.
And then what happened is he got rid of these people. What he did is he brought somebody in to look after the people that he was leaving behind. And And pointed them all at this person and it freed him up and he went off to do all these other things. Now, as usually happens in a story like this, it didn’t just end there.
Uh, what happened was he so enjoyed his new role that his value in the marketplace went up and he started getting headhunting offers, headhunter offers that all over the place, which increased his value to his existing firm and his potential value to other people. He was having a ball, he was making more money, and of course, people began to ask him how he did it.
Now that little story. is a story [00:34:00] that I used on a guy who is in exactly that position. All I did was I, I told his story, but I changed the name. So it wasn’t, his name wasn’t Paul. So when he saw himself in the role of Paul and he said, so who is this guy? I said, it’s you.
He just went, Oh, it just makes perfect sense. So it’s a story. But the beauty of the story is people remember so much more data. Within a story, they, they remember the ebb and flow of the story. They remember the challenges. A story follows a pattern. There’s a hero. The hero has some issues. The hero has he, he refuses the call to action.
For whatever reason, a crisis occurs. He has to make a decision. He finds a guide. A guide gives him advice. tells him there’s going to be this result or that result. He follows it. He wins the girl at the end of it. He lived happily ever after, but he also has a major transformation, which changes him from what he was before [00:35:00] to something bigger than he was before.
And that’s the basic structure of every fairy tale. And we can apply that in our conversations with our clients by placing our clients at the heart of the story.
Thomas: When we’re talking about the hero’s journey, and I wanted to Ask you this Ross, because if you look at, you put the customer at the center and I found that customers like it when it goes about them, right?
Like I think every human being likes when, when they, people talk with them in the middle. Um, and I think that is, that is the first step of also kind of understanding and emphasizing with your customer. It’s not like as an, and I found this in, in, in our journey as well. It’s not, we are not the most important person at the start of the conversation, it is the customer.
It’s like the relationship piece within, uh, that you build up with your customer generally actually, [00:36:00] well, starts defining once you close a deal where it, now they start to be more interested in you and this particular for the software agency industry. They don’t care about your brand. They don’t care about your agency.
They don’t even care about you care about themselves and what you can give them. And then in that journey. Um, you become more and more important because they realize, Oh, Charlie is this guy that actually he, he sold me this product. He helped me build this. He did the marketing for me. Oh, I want to do, I want to do more with Charlie because I trust Charlie.
But at the beginning, there’s no, it’s the hero’s journey. And that’s it. There’s no, you’re, you’re. The narrator, and that’s about it. I’m not sure that I understand that Thomas. So that passed me again. So what I, what I find, like, so the, the customers like to talk about themselves, right? Like that’s, that’s always, and we take, I wouldn’t say take advantage of it, but we use that in order to sell, but we are as, as people who sell less important as a person to the [00:37:00] customer.
Um, so our biases and our perspectives are far less important than at the first couple of. Interactions with the client, they, they be, you become as a salesperson that sells more important to the customer. Uh, while this relationship develops, that was always my understanding. And that’s also, I think, and I’d like to first see if that is correct.
Uh, but also I think the piece of. Um, that means that as a sales person, as a person that sells, you need to like keep your biases, uh, outside of any conversation as much as you can, because it’s about the customer. It’s not about you, at least not at the beginning.
Ross: There’s an interesting dynamic at play when you engage with people.
in a particular manner as a sales person or as somebody engaged in a business dialogue with somebody. When you are able [00:38:00] to, um, ask questions that really get the customer thinking, um, when you ask questions like, so, so for example, the question like, what would become possible if, or what do you notice when, right?
The client can’t give you a glib answer. The client has to go inside of themselves and organize their thoughts in such a way they have to burn some calories to give you an answer that’s meaningful. And so they have to invest in the answer, put some effort into it. The experience that they have of people who ask that kind of questions, is becomes attractive to them when they can see what becomes possible, right?
When we help to guide them to formulate perhaps new thoughts or outcomes of thoughts that they haven’t finished [00:39:00] thinking about properly yet, or they haven’t concluded. Um, simply by being there as a professional challenging them in a way that is really good for them and they get a lot of benefit out of it, weds them to you without you having to display anything else about your character.
They don’t need to know what football team you support. They just know that when I’m with this person, I have a different experience than when I’m with that person. So when this person, when that person from the other sales company comes, They just ask me the same old stuff. I might as well give them a sheet of A4 paper or a spreadsheet and just say, go and work on that.
Whereas when Thomas comes to see me, we have a conversation that, you know, I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I come away with all sorts of thoughts that I hadn’t had before. And so. You’re quite right, you’re not putting your biases in, but what happens is they do have a very powerful experience of you because you’ve engaged them in a way [00:40:00] that forces them to spend some calories on answering your questions.
And I’ve always found that to be a very valuable thing, a very powerful thing, because they don’t actually have to like you very much to get the value. That’s a very good point, right? They might say, I never want to go for a beer with Ross. I don’t even like Ross, but when Ross comes to see me, he asked me a whole bunch of stuff and I ended up knowing more about my job when I finished with this conversation that with this guy that I don’t like very much than I did before we had the conversation.
And that’s why I’ll keep talking to him. Yeah. That makes sense.
Thomas: Yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense. And I, and it kind of goes into my next question in there as well, because Knowing this, how is that, how do you, um, create a really good lasting first impression? I think you already mentioned some of it in, in your previous answer, but what is this part of that?
Ross: Oh, are you talking about rapport building and stuff like that? Let me
Charlie: add, if I can, I think, [00:41:00] Coming from the perspective of zero to one, if we’ve got our, our nascent entrepreneur and they want to get in front of Mr, you know, big director of company to buy that particular product, how do you a start that interaction in a way that leaves some impact?
How do you get into the room? And then from there you want to leave enough of a hook or lasting first impression that they want to have another conversation with you.
Ross: Okay, um, that to me sounds like a different conversation than the one Thomas and I were having. Let me just go back to the Thomas thing.
If I can round that off, um, simply by saying, it’s really quite easy to start to create a favorable impression with somebody that you’ve just met. Without going through all sorts of ridiculous hoops and tricks and jumps and, you know, trying to match and mirror their body language and all that other stuff.
Don’t do that. You simply [00:42:00] have to show up. Now, show up is all in capital letters. So, showing up for lots of people is they turn up in their flash car, um, in their nice suit with their gelled hair and their painted fingernails and stuff like that. And they make an impression. They, they show up in a physical sense that is, you know, it’s quite impressive, but, but that’s not what the customer is interested in.
What I mean by showing up is that you show up fully prepared to engage. To serve, to be there for your client’s benefit, to give a hundred percent of yourself. And if you have to make a few mistakes and apologize for things that you got wrong all the way through, it doesn’t matter. People can tell a mile off somebody who was turned up with a sincere intention.
of serving and showing up. They can tell that person a mile away from somebody else who’s just going through the motions and they can tell the difference between somebody who’s only shown up 97%. So the first thing to do is to make [00:43:00] yourself the promise that every time you meet with a customer or you speak with a customer that nothing else in the whole world matters.
You show up for them a hundred percent. You give them everything you’ve got in terms of your attention. Your thinking, your willingness to serve and listen. And you can make all the blunders in the world, but if people pick up that you’re that person who’s there to serve, they’ll forgive every one of those little mistakes because they’ll say, this person’s here to help me.
I like this, I like this. They can’t help but like it ’cause that’s the way humans are wired up. Pretty much.
Thomas: Yeah. It makes, yeah, makes a, makes a lot of sense. It’s funny that you’re saying a servant, uh, being, being servant. And, uh, when you were talking, reminded me a lot of servant leadership, uh, that we have in management.
And I think this, this, this. It’s exactly, it falls in that same piece. It’s about serving, showing up, um, [00:44:00] and servant leadership is not, you’re not a slave and you’re not doing what everybody says, no, no, you lead by example, uh, but you also, you, you, you don’t, you don’t sell me. You don’t need to, right. Like that’s, that’s, I think that, sorry, in management said, like you don’t, you don’t manage if you don’t need to, if there isn’t a team that runs by itself, you’re a coach and you’re a motivator and you’re, you know, you take the piece of the plate that it is.
Causing impediment. And I think that’s with sales no different.
Ross: Well, let me ask you a question. What do you suppose happens when a person who knows how to show up, shows up for a client, they have outcome of the outcome conversations with the client and they are able to put the client. into the middle of a story, which shows them the trajectory from where they are to where they might be.
And [00:45:00] the client has an experience of what that might be like for them. What do you think starts to happen for that particular salesperson?
Charlie: Well, they transition to trusted. You’re no longer Yeah.
Ross: They, they start winning deals,
Charlie: the grail,
Ross: right? They start winning business. And when you have outcome of the outcome conversations, which are based upon the numbers, the example that we talked about before, you know, 150 turn in 250 K when you’re using those numbers with that client.
If you’re able to have that conversation that says, wow, would you be willing to invest 60 to get 250 back within 12 months? Do you think they’re going to argue about the 60K? Are they going to try to knock you down to 58? I don’t think so. So you’re not competing on price anymore. You’re competing on value, competing on aspiration.
You’re, you’re competing on the [00:46:00] experience that they want to have. So my suggestion would be that that person that’s capable of doing, they know how to show up. They know how they’re wired up. They know how to talk about outcomes of the outcomes. They’re there to serve. They’re there to gather and collate the data that the custom customer gives them and turn it into meaningful outcomes.
Turn that into a story that resonates with the customer. That person’s not competing on price anymore. That person’s competing on value and the value has been articulated in the client’s own words, so there’s no argument. And how powerful is that?
Thomas: Yeah, no, that, that’s, and I think that’s. That separates people that sell and people that love what they do in that matter, they love to sell and they, as you said, they show up for a hundred percent, they engage, um, and because of that, they start winning deals.
It is, uh, it’s, it’s simple, but it’s at the same [00:47:00] time also very hard because you’re asking from all of your people that sell to always be at a hundred percent. And that is the job.
Ross: Um, you can only give a hundred percent of what you have available at the time.
Thomas: Fair.
Ross: Okay, so let’s say you’re having a few difficulties at home, and the best that you can offer is 80%.
If you give a hundred percent of your 80%, people will understand that nobody’s asking you to be perfect. I would submit, Thomas, it’s actually a less stressful and easier way of engaging with clients than trying to hoodwink them and come up with a smart line every time to get them to say yes when they really want to say no.
Because cancellations are stressful. Debookings are stressful.
Charlie: I agree. I agree. When you’re I mean, so to put it in context for our listeners, when we’re, when we get the opportunity to be in front of someone that we actually [00:48:00] want to sell to, and we know that what we’ve got can help them put the numbers in front of them, make them the Neo of the hero’s journey.
Detach from your own biases by showing up and empathizing with what the customer needs. And then by being there and being present, you deliver the wow factor that they’re going to sense that. They’re going to know that this is someone that. understands my problem that wants to work with me that wants to serve rather than, you know, claim as much money as I can in the margin as possible for the deal that I’m going to make.
People have that six cents. I agree. Um, and, and I think actually through naturally doing that, this section of perceived value and that competitive landscape, you’re, you’re going to be seen as a trusted advisor. So that, that is your competitive advantage, regardless of what it is you’re selling.
Ross: There are so many.
Little things [00:49:00] that, that, that go into making a difference. I mean, there’s no question that, um, let’s say somebody starting their business. They ask themselves the right questions to start off with. First question is, is this beautiful thing that I’ve created, is there a market for it? Does, does it solve a problem?
And if so, what problem does it solve? And how big is the problem? How much pain does it create? Because if you’ve just created something which is magnificent, simply because it’s magnificent, then you might sell one to your mom, one to your granny, one to your best friend, and one to, an eccentric billionaire that likes buying stupid stuff because they just have so much money.
Um, but after that it’s going to be hard. So first thing is, is there a market for what I want? How do I understand whatever this market? Go and ask.
All [00:50:00] right, got a new pen. Fantastic. Okay, what, why would I buy this pen instead of a different pen? I don’t know. Oh, well, good luck with that then. You know, think about the problem that you’re trying to solve. And, see, Charlie and I, um, have been through this a lot where we, we came up with some stuff that we felt was absolutely brilliant and the world had to have it.
Now, Charlie and I should know better. Hey, we’ve done this before. We should know better than to fall in love with our own thing, but we did. We fell in love with our own thing and we thought the world should fall in love with it too, but the world didn’t. So we had to go back and go, hang on a second. We need to ask the world what it thinks it wants.
So we did that. So we did some testing. So when we talked about in terms of the value mentor program, which is, it’s aimed at professional salespeople that really, um, want to take themselves to the next level. I mean, basically they want to join the 1%. Right. And the 1 percent has got nothing to [00:51:00] do with the size of the deals.
It’s to do with the quality of the salesperson and how you engage with your client and creating a win rate that allows you to become an autonomous thing. So for example, if you have this pen and you say, I want to earn a quarter of a million pounds this year, therefore I have to sell this many at this level of margin.
Okay. I’m going to go and make that happen because you, you know how to do it. Say, okay. I have a story that goes with this. I’m very clear about the problem that it solves. And so when you’re having the conversation with people about the problem that it solves, it’s not about the product again. People don’t care about your product.
Your products are relevant. It’s what becomes possible for them when they have that product. And what they can do that they can’t do with anybody else’s product. And when you have that conversation with them, they’ll tell you what it’s worth to them. And when they tell you what it’s worth to them, [00:52:00] you, you get to decide how much you charge for it.
Okay. So when we learned that, we learned that the people that we wanted to talk to about value mentor were people who are already successful, but had this really gnawing pain in their guts that told them, I know there’s so much more, but I don’t know where to get it. How do I get beyond the ceiling that I’ve hit?
And it was incredibly simple for them. But what they’d done was they’d worked really, really hard on amassing hard selling skills that you can learn out of a book, but not the how do I engage in conversation with people so that I can engineer an outcome for this person that gives them a transformational experience.
and propels them towards solving this problem for themselves willingly. It’s about engaging in a different way. So when we presented this wonderful and shiny thing that we’d created, That way, [00:53:00] right? We filled the books
Charlie: quickly, right?
Ross: Because what we, we are taking our own medicine, right? But because we were so in love with our shiny baby, we forgot the first principles.
We thought that everyone will love this because it’s just so good. No, we have to go back to first principles. What experience do these people have and how do we engineer that for them in a way that is. will delight them. And then once we did that, it became easy.
Thomas: This is like the amount of conversations you’ve probably had.
And I think we’ve all three had with starting founders or entrepreneurs that you, where they hit that point. It, it, it truly fascinates me. Um, and, and including myself, right? Like it’s, as you said, you should know better. Because you know how this works and you still fall into it. And I think that’s why it’s so important to, to talk to others.
Right. And, and we, we have, so, you know, we run an, [00:54:00] an, an agency that does, um, a lot of development, but also we do blockchain development and one of our mottos is, why do you need blockchain? And we have these conversations sometimes with customers that they come in and we always say, look, if you have a.
Like it’s one storytelling about why you need it, but you can then generally say in one Alinea, if you need 20 minutes to explain why any blockchain, you probably don’t need blockchain. And the interesting part is that we found with, with a lot of these clients in this space that they sometimes just want blockchain because of the hype or whatever else.
We’re like, Whoa, your idea is really good. Like the product that you’re going to sell, I think really adds value. It there’s, there’s, there’s a go to market. There’s a product market fit. You don’t need specifically blockchain. And that’s, um, it’s always interesting to see those reactions back because they, they talk to us because they want development.
They’re like, yeah, but we want blockchain. It’s like, yeah, but there’s no need for it. Why would you spend 50, a hundred, 200, 000 on something that [00:55:00] you won’t need? Yeah. Because everybody else like, and now there’s a conversation going on. Why not? And, and this is, we’ve seen outcomes coming out of this where people just walked away and said like, no, we want blockchain.
We’re going to do it with somebody else. That’s, that’s fair. That’s fine. Like the power of saying no is, is on our side here. Uh, but also people that said like, wait, but you said we can’t do it without blockchain of it, we can’t do it without blockchain. Um, so that means we can do it. You think it’s a good idea?
Yes. We think it’s a good idea and it will cost you significantly less because now we’re taking out a substantial piece that is very customer unfriendly and def unfriendly to bill. Okay, let’s have this conversation and continue. And those were deals that were generally very easy to win. Um, just because of this, right?
Like we gave them the feedback, but we’re also in a transparent way. Hey, your blockchain piece is not relevant, but the rest of your idea is. And [00:56:00] obviously there’s the other side of it where we say your idea is not relevant. Like it, it just doesn’t, it won’t fit in the technology technological space that we’re currently in.
Um, you’re, you’re free to build it, but we’re not going to build it for you. But the interest of, of like, what’d you say? That, that the ping pong, the realization and. Even with yourself, Charlie, myself, serial entrepreneurs, people always will fall into that gap because you always will fall at least a little bit in love with what
Charlie: you do.
You need to, yeah.
Thomas: You need
Ross: to. We’re human. It’s perfectly natural. We all get sucked into misunderstandings that we shouldn’t get sucked into. We do it all the time. It’s just, a necessary part of being a human being. And as you say, quite rightly, Thomas, the most, one of the most powerful things you can do is to talk to other people about it.
And, um, you know, that [00:57:00] if I may, it brings me on to, uh, something else that, which I’ve noticed a lot with, um, people who have new ideas that they want to bring. And that is, um, so what do you think you’re selling? And then very often you’ll get the answer that it says, um, well, uh, let’s, let’s use an example from the value mentor program.
Um, there’s a lady called Laura that runs a company called the green widget company and they make green widgets. I don’t even know what a widget is. It doesn’t matter what it is. Let’s say it’s a small green ball bearing and they make green ball bearings. And she goes to a trade show and she meets this person happens to be the CEO of a target customer of hers.
And he goes, Oh, Laura, the green widget company, what do you do?[00:58:00]
See if this sounds familiar. Well, I’m the CEO of the green widget company and, uh, we’re the premier manufacturer of green widgets in the UK. We exported 250 billion green widgets to Europe in the last year. Very profitable. Um, you know, our stock price is doing well and, uh, You know, uh, people really like our product.
Our latest one is just amazing. We’ve cracked the barrier between this nanotechnology and this Pico technology. And it’s just, right. So the guy who said, ah, Laura, what do you do? His eyes have glazed over and he’s going, where is the nearest exit? Right. And she’s so enthusiastic and she’s so passionate. So later on, Laura has a conversation with somebody and they said, whoa, whoa, whoa, Laura, let’s Laura stop.
Stop, stop, stop, stop. So they have a little conversation. So what kind of people use your green widgets? Well, they go into CT scan machines and CAT [00:59:00] scan machines and MRI scanners. Oh yeah. Why? Well, what they do is they reduce the vibrations and, and the scanners to almost nothing. Oh, yeah. So what does the hospital notice?
Well, the hospital, the, the, the re-scan rate is dropped by like 90%. So instead of having to re-scan one in two. They only have to rescan one in eight now. Wow. And it takes half the time to get the patient through. And they have, they’ve also noticed that more, more patients are turning up for these things because lots of people don’t like to go inside the scanners because they’re quite scary and uh, whatever.
Okay. That’s what the Green Widget Company does. So the next time Laura meets the CEO, she says, well, We did this amazing thing where, for example, we transform the experience that people going through scanning machines at hospitals have. So instead of being terrified in a clunky, nasty, frightening machine, they’re listening to classical music and they came out and they’ve had a [01:00:00] really good time.
And it makes the hospitals 50 percent more money, halves their costs. Everybody loves it. And it’s just so much fun for us to be involved in. A hundred percent difference. Right. And so the CEO goes, how do you do that, Laura? He’s just invited her in for a call. So if you’re starting off, what is it that your thing does create a magical little story?
What does it do? So for example, if you’re a barber, you don’t just trim beards. What you do is you sculpt gentlemen’s faces. You know what I mean?
Thomas: No, no, no. But it, it, it, it. It’s a totally different, different feeling, even if you say it right now. If I, if I, and I happen to have a beer, but if you say that, I’m like, Oh yeah, I should actually go to the barber instead of doing it myself because he is really good at it and he sculpts it in a way that, and now I just got myself invited to a barber appointment.
Ross: [01:01:00] Exactly. So when, when Charlie got his, his face done and Charlie used to look like a pumpkin, but, uh, he went and he said to this guy, he said, what sort of, I would like to know what sort of experience I could have as somebody that looked like a human being.
And so that’s what they did. They said, Charlie, I’m the guy that transforms pumpkins, not into carriages for Cinderella, but into handsome serial entrepreneurs.
They did a good job. So, so what you do is, it can be as ridiculous as you want, but you should be able to encapsulate what you do into about 15 to 20 seconds. And if you’ve done it well, then somebody will go, how the heck do you do that then?
Thomas: And this is such a valuable lesson that after being so long in software, I see myself falling into it every now and then [01:02:00] still.
And I think, you know, again, we’re selling software, right? We’re talking about entrepreneurs and our entrepreneurs that we work with and our founders that we work with are sometimes very technical. So they will tell you all the great technicalities of what they’re doing, which is great. 90 percent or 99 percent of people you’ll talk to, they’ll be like, yeah, where’s the exit.
There’s that one, one person that says like, Oh yeah, I’m also technical. I get it. But it’s probably not your buyer. It might be that eccentric billionaire, as you mentioned, right? Like, but if you explain, and this is, I think a skill that is so important in starting companies, if you are able to explain what the benefit is, what, what the value.
It’s storytelling. It transforms, it transforms it to something where you say, Oh, this is something that I can actually maybe implement. Or maybe I see some values for this. Okay. Let’s have a call. Let’s, or Hey, at least give me your number. Right? Like [01:03:00] let’s, have some, have a conversation.
Ross: It is, you know, the, the, um, my suggestion to your, your listeners and viewers would be take 15, 20 minutes, cause you won’t do it in less than that, unless you have a piece of divine inspiration, which sometimes happens.
Think of a 10 to 15 second explanation about what it is you do that your grandmother or a five year old will understand and be able to replay to you. And if you can’t do that, then you don’t really know what you do yet. It’s still too complicated. When your granny can replay what you’ve just told her, and she can understand it, that’s where you start.
Because when they ask you what you do or what your thing does, they don’t really want to know. Mostly they’re being polite. But if you can encapsulate it into something which is intriguing, interesting, but it gets them thinking, [01:04:00] How do you do that? That’s what you want them to leave with. You want to leave them with a sense of curiosity.
You don’t want them to know that it’s a 64 bit anchovy grater. You know, you just say, Oh, we make something to turn fish molecules into paste so people can put their dentures in. What? Anchovy paste into what? They’re thinking.
Thomas: And
Ross: it’s a bit of humor involved.
Thomas: And I think coming to technology selling, I think that a mistake that People often make is that they sell the technology and which is, I, yeah, absolutely.
Look at AI, look at LLMs, look at blockchain, great technologies, but what does it matter for your end user? Right? Like if, if I say I’m building the next big SAS platform and I’m using all these crazy blockchain technologies. You’ll probably say, Ross, yeah, that’s [01:05:00] great. But why should I care? Right. Where I say like, look, I have a system that rewards loyalty.
If you use this platform and I’m spreading it out through Arbor shops, uh, that you so frequently visit, uh, in Manchester, uh, and the first 10 visits, uh, you’ll get an, a loyalty that has, by the way, a really cool picture. If you’re not interested in it, it doesn’t matter, but you get a loyalty card. Okay. And maybe you’re now, you go for the first time and you get that picture and you’re like, Hey, that’s.
It goes somewhere. You still don’t really care about the technology, which is you care about what comes out of it, the value that it brings. Uh, or adds to your personal experience, not to, and if I will tell you, yeah, no, but it’s run on the Ethereum, uh, or on a base layer too. You’re like, okay, that is great for you, but I have no idea what these five words just meant, and it has zero value to me, and I think that is a piece that is for our listeners in, in, in the industry that [01:06:00] we’re sitting in and it goes for AI, that goes for LMS.
I think people very often sell the technology, but not the value and, and user value. Um,
Charlie: yeah, they sell the features, don’t they?
Thomas: They sell the features. They sell the features of the technology, not of
Charlie: their product. What I think is really interesting kind of round this piece off is, so it’s aligning value propositions with the customer needs.
How do we identify, or how would you go about identifying a customer needs, right? And this is, you know, we don’t have a phone book. We don’t have bags of money to do lots of research.
Ross: Um, well, give, give me a hypothetical example of, of somebody that’s doing this.
Charlie: Uh, new startup CEO has got a little bit of seed capital to build a, let’s call it a financial product that is raising capital on tokens.
And what they allow the people to do is [01:07:00] essentially make more money by giving them yield. So they invest the vehicle and the vehicle then provides yield for the, for the people to. You know, supported the project through project finance and tokens. So what they’re trying to do is to get a larger entity.
Oh no, they’re trying to sell that, that vehicle to the public, for example.
Ross: Okay, but they’ve, they’ve got somebody investing in them.
Charlie: A couple hundred grand, enough for them to build it.
Ross: Okay, so somebody has stumped up a couple of hundred grand. So they believe in the idea. They think the idea has lex. Yep.
Okay. So are these institutional people or is that their dad. Okay. In which case, it’s different. If it was institutional people, then you, your first port of call would likely be those institutional investors and say, Hey, your black book is bigger than my black book because my black book has nobody in it.
Right. Let’s talk about some names. If [01:08:00] it’s mom and dad, um, then if they’re willing to stump up, then hopefully they’ve asked you the question, who do you think you’re going to sell this to? And who’s going to buy it? Because if you haven’t thought about that, then wow, you’ve got some problems. Um, if what you’ve done is you’ve just gone, I’ve got this fantastic thing that’s going to create some yield.
Well, based on what intelligence? I mean, if it’s just theoretical, um, then maybe before you spend too much more money, go and talk to a university professor about it or somebody, but go and bounce your idea off somebody else who’s got no vested interest in ripping your idea off, but would be able to give you some input.
Um, if it passes that, if it passes that test, And it is, you know, if this thing was in the world, then these are the types of people that would be interested in it and this is what they would do with it. And this is how their lives would change or their circumstances would change as a result of it being successful for them.
Well, then you start building an avatar about, okay, where are [01:09:00] these people? What do they look like? It’s, it’s forensic. You and I have done it. We, we, you have to go and start digging up. This stuff, where do these people live? What do they look like? What are their interests? How much money do they make? How much disposable income do they need to have as an individual to buy this from me?
If this, if it’s people of 100, 000 pounds per year and more, um, how much do I need to charge these people in order to get them the return they need, but I need to get a return. So you need to have thought all that through. Once you’ve thought all that through, um, then it’s okay. Where will I find these people?
I’ll find them on LinkedIn. Okay, so start building a campaign. At that point, it’s all about action. It’s legwork, donkey work, hard work, dig the people up, ask everybody you know, right? We learned that as well. If we, if we have a client and the client comes to the program quick, successfully, one of the [01:10:00] things that we get them to sign up for before they go on the program is they guarantee to give us three qualified names that we can approach with a recommendation at the end of the program.
That’s how we built the program. That’s how we grew the program. That’s how we got people on it because we had ready made testimonials. ready made people we could speak to. And then when we spoke to those people, if they said no, they said, we’d say, could you give me a couple of names of folks that you think might be interested in this so we can give them, it’s really simple stuff.
We get on the phone and we phone them up. So it’s legwork, it’s activity because it’s really easy to dig up loads of people to speak to who are never going to buy from you. And then you congratulate yourself for being busy and thinking you’re doing the right things, but actually you’re just digging yourself an early grave.
Thomas: Very important point.
Ross: Validate your idea. Really validate your idea. Test it. [01:11:00] Give it away, if you have to, to get the feedback. Find out how it behaves in the real world before you invest too much money in it. Go and get a couple of captive clients who are quite willing to take a risk with you, so that if it goes tits up, it’s not going to cost anybody’s life.
Learn from it. Reiterate. It’s not rocket science. It’s just in the beginning. It’s hard. That’s why so few people do it. Hang on. This guy’s got a billion followers on YouTube and he doesn’t say very much. It can’t be that hard. Well, probably a lot harder than you think it is. You know, we’re now starting to see the YouTube burnout generation.
They’re just saying, I can’t do this anymore. I thought I did this to have a lifestyle change and it took over my life. I’m having to work 80 hours a week just to keep, to keep up with the algorithm and all the funds gone out of it. You know, it’s, it’s hard work to get it done, but the good news is so few people are prepared to put in the legwork that if [01:12:00] you are a new entrant into a market that you’ve helped create and you do put the legwork into it, you’re almost guaranteed success.
If you follow the other principles that we’ve been talking about. So I don’t have a magical answer for you. It’s grunt work.
Thomas: I still think that’s a pretty magical answer because I think that not everybody wants to hear that. And I think that the point of what you just said, um, you can be very busy with nothing.
People that never will buy from you and then still congratulate yourself. Yeah, but I’m very busy. Uh, we used to call them lifestyle people. They’d want to have a company. Sort of just can say they want it. They have a company. Oh yeah. No, we have a company. Oh, we don’t do like our, our sales doesn’t go well.
Yeah. Cause your lifestyle, it is, as you said, like it is hard, hard work. You gotta do it. You gotta put the hours in, you gotta put the groundwork in. Um, and then there, there can be a light at the tunnel. And then also, even if you put the groundwork in, there’s no guarantee that, [01:13:00] you know, your, your target customer will say, wow, that was a great idea.
They can equally say, no, that’s a terrible idea, but then at least you get the validation. And at least you understand what not to do and what to do next. Should I refine the idea? Should I just throw it out of the window and do something else? Those are all valuable insights. Um, and it’s good to get those very early on.
Ross: Yep. Well, absolutely. There’s just one more to stick in there. And that is the idea that inertia is your friend. Once you get used to doing this. And once you get ahead of steam up, it’s far easier to keep going than it is to stop and start. So once you get on the blower and making the calls. If your appointment book’s full, don’t stop making the calls.
Just go into the next month and the next month and the next month. Keep making the calls. It’s like, it’s like training. You start running and you go away on holiday and say, okay, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll run again when I get home. Good chance you won’t.
Charlie: That’s [01:14:00] true. I’ve been guilty of that many times.
Thomas: And, and the, the, the, what I found here though, is it is the, the, the, like restarting is the hardest.
Um, but if you restart after and your previous campaign or your previous calls or your previous training went very well, I found that the validation of doing it, restarting it, yes, it’s really hard, but after that first call, after the first training, after whatever you do, you’re like, I’m proud of myself because I did it.
And now the rest of those calls don’t seem that scary anymore or that they’re not a barrier, you know, like, all right, I’m doing it anyway. It gets you back into the rhythm. Um,
Charlie: but again, it’s effort. So we were talking about, uh, financial incentives and ROI. How do we demonstrate the financial benefits of a product or service within a sales call that, that piece, right?
Like how we actually do the piece we’re talking about right at the beginning.
Ross: Some simple questioning, [01:15:00] really. Um, a traditional salesperson would, you know, probably go the route of, um, what sort of budget have you allocated towards this project? What is your anticipated return? When you invest in projects such as this, how quickly do you want them to pay, pay for themselves?
There’s that way, which is perfectly valid. The other way, which, um, might be more linked to outcome of the outcome types of conversations would be, um, so Thomas, this project that you’re looking to engage in, um, can you give me a bit of background? Why are you doing it? What are you guys hoping to get out of this?
Thomas: Are you talking about what the three?
Ross: Yeah. So this would be, you know, hypothetically, you’ve got a project, I’d say, what are you hoping to get out of this?
Thomas: We’d like to, um, have an, like build a [01:16:00] substantial reputation in our market, um, as a market leader in de risking both. Operations, marketing, and technology in our sector.
Ross: Okay. Reputation is one thing. What else? You’re not just going to do it for reputation. What else would you do it for?
Thomas: A good salary, good deals. Um, I always say fun, uh, which is important for me, um, recognition. And I think the, let me say the recognition of the expertise that we bring. That would be my, my, my points.
Ross: Okay, so how would you quantify those? I mean, how would you know that you’re doing a good job in achieving those things?
Thomas: I would see, I would see there’s two ways of how I would quantify that. One is recommendations of existing clients or older clients. Uh, and two, and that’s the reputation piece I was mentioning people reaching out because they heard of you one way or another, either by myself or by [01:17:00] Charlie or, you know, One of our tech teams did a, uh, or patient teams did blog posts and a trust factor because we’ve been in the market long enough and we have enough case studies to support that we are good at what we’re doing.
Ross: Sure. What justification are you using internally for this project? What metrics had to be satisfied in order to get the sign off for it?
Thomas: The metrics are leads. Thanks. Thanks. How many leads we can, we can get through, uh, this, this project. So there is no hard KPI on this because the first time we’re doing this, but we would look at 10 leads, let’s say.
Ross: 10
Thomas: leads.
Ross: 10 leads. And of those 10 leads, how many, how many leads of those 10, assuming they’re qualified leads, how many of those would you expect to close?
Thomas: I’d say two, uh, at about between a hundred and 175.
Ross: Okay, so let’s keep it 100, 000, so that’s potentially 200, 000 worth of additional revenue. Okay, we now have a piece of information we can work with.[01:18:00]
All the other, all the other stuff was fluff.
Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.
Ross: Okay. I, I, I can’t work with fluff. So I’m going, okay, so 200k. Okay. Out of that 200k, how much of that is, is going to be margin back into the business? What’s your gross margin on that? Let’s say it’s 20%. 20%. Okay. 40k. How much do these leads cost you? How much is this project going to cost?
Talk to me about that for a bit.
Thomas: Let’s say 30k.
Ross: Okay. See, now I’m beginning to get a profile about what you’re going to have to invest and all the rest of it. So what we’re now talking about is you talking about investing right about 30 K to get 40 K back. Right. And you know, a question I might ask is, is that a big enough return for a 30 K investment?
Thomas: And that would be a very good follow up question. I would answer that. Say yes, because we’re a starting company. We expect that if we do this again. That ROI goes up, um, by X five in the right market circumstances.
Ross: Sure. In the right circumstances. So, I mean, [01:19:00] how would you engineer that? Because, uh, you would need to re engineer either in terms of getting better, or what do you think you would learn that would allow you to do that five X thing?
Thomas: Uh, well, I would say market circumstances really are heavily drawn on it, but that’s, that’s one thing. The second thing is, um, and that’s, that’s what I mentioned before reputation recognition in the market. That’s a really important piece in blockchain. Uh, so we would need, we would need to launch it again quick, like a similar campaign in order to do an X five, because now there’s an upcoming bull run, which we want to profit from.
Ross: Sure. Okay. The stuff that you’ve given me in terms of, um, justification for the project. If I was trying to get deeper into the conversation with you is, is pretty light on content so far. Um, the stuff that I can use that I can turn into value is, uh, you’d be looking for two qualified leads to close out of 10 qualified, 10, [01:20:00] 10 leads generated to, it might lead to 200k, which would lead to 40k in GM.
I would probably work around those figures. And start having a conversation in terms of, um, what do you suppose
in the 10 leads and the two closes and the gross margin and the turnover, what do you suppose would have the biggest impact fastest that would bring you the scalability that you crave? What thing do you think we should change first? What would make the biggest difference if we changed one of those things that you told me about, which one would it be?
Thomas: I think honestly, and, and. This, this is also my bias. So I’m very curious about, I would say reputation, become reputable in the market very quick. That, that is so doing as much projects as you can for companies that have some cloud, some influence in order to be seen, Oh, these are the guys that do X and have done X for Y and Z.[01:21:00]
Ross: Okay. I get that. I get the reasoning for that. What do you suppose? I would choose.
Thomas: Not, not in recognition probably.
Ross: Not directly because I think it would come indirectly as a result of changing and improvement in your close rate. Okay, so if you were to increase your close rate from 2 in 10 on qualified leads to 4 in 10, Which is pretty much in line with an averagely good sales organization.
Then automatically we’ve doubled the size of your business. And that’s probably the easiest one to work with. If you’re able to close four out of ten, your reputation will improve faster because the number of clients and your take on rate is improving. Your reputation Will improve because you will have learned more dealing with for clients instead of to, you’ll learn more about your [01:22:00] process.
You’ll learn more about your ability to deliver and the challenges that you’ll face within that. And you will learn more about how to refine your message to turn that either to the next stage would be five and 10. And I think you could probably get to six and 10. If you’ve got a really good value proposition, if you qualify lead and you really know what you’re doing, you should be able to get to six and 10 because you’re going to have outcome of the outcome conversations that nobody else is going to have.
Yeah. So it’s going to be a differentiator. As soon as you have those conversations, your margins are going to go up because you’re now going to be able to charge what your product’s worth. Because you’re going to have the experience that says, well, Mr. So and so, XYZ company signed up with us and they went from A to B within the period of six months and their average sale value went from here to here, um, their stock price went up and all the rest of that.
They invested 100, 000 with us initially, um, and now they’re investing 100, 000 per quarter. Um, [01:23:00] and that’s yielding this sort of return. And on the basis of that, we would be looking to charge you X. And you might just say, okay, what, what GM do we want to work on? We want to work on 40%. If you can demonstrate the value through your outcome of outcome conversations with these people, then it’s not going to be a problem because they will tell you what numbers they need.
And you’ll be able to work around that and be able to charge what you’re worth.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s a very valuable insight. That makes sense. Yeah. A hundred percent. And, and it’s, and again, it’s value creation. It’s the right value creation. Um, I, I actually, I, I, I have some, some pointers that I need to think about right now, but that is really, I really, really like that.
Um,
Ross: how many companies do you think there are out there in the world that are actually doing that right now?
Thomas: Very few, very few. Uh, I always give the example of like coming from software agency here in Poland, right? [01:24:00] Like there’s a lot of software agencies here in Poland. Uh, the interesting part is always, you go to any conference, always like, yeah, find your niche, find your niche.
Finding a niche is, I mean, it’s almost impossible. You generally stumble upon it and you do good work. And at least in this industry. Um, so when you say like, you know, outcome after the outcome. That, that is conversation. I probably think that 98 percent or 99 percent of these, these agencies don’t have.
Because they’re not, they don’t look at that for, for good reason, because they’ve never been told to, they’ve been told, look at your niche.
Ross: Yeah. Well, isn’t that exciting that all these other people are out doing that stuff that doesn’t work. And all you have to do is start doing a few things that does that do work.
And then, you know, what becomes possible for you guys now that you know how to do this?
Thomas: It will put myself out of business, which is great.
Ross: Yeah, you’ll be
Charlie: rich. I’m mindful of time moving on to the last couple of [01:25:00] segments. But right before we do that, the last topic was self selling and the use of questions.
Essentially, how are we guiding customers through the self selling journey? How do we get them to sell themselves?
Ross: Um, does that mean how do we create? an experience for them during the course of our conversations that, uh, lets them feel that the experience of buying is entirely of their own volition rather than being sold to?
Charlie: That, yeah.
Ross: Well, I’m, I’m going to sound like a stuck record again, which is you keep talking about the outcomes of the outcomes and what they think they want and what’s going to become possible. What will it be like when you have this, right? Describe what it’ll be like when you have this. And don’t let them get away with nodding and going, yeah, yeah, it’s going to be great.
No. How is it going to be great? Specifically, give me three things that you think you’ll notice when these things become true for your business. Okay. So the first one I said I [01:26:00] wanted was I wanted to increase our margins by 20 40 percent from 25%. Okay. What will you be able to do with 40 percent GM that you can’t do now on 20?
Charlie: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Ross: Hire another sales guy, which will bring in another million dollars worth of sales, and hire another good PM to make sure that we keep delivering. Okay, so you got another new PM and a sales guy, a sales gal that’s going to work for you and doing a good job for you. Um, what does that mean?
Okay, good job. So they’re going to bring another million, a million at 20 percent or a million at 40%? 40%. So there’s another million at 40%, so there’s another 400, 000 coming in next year. What are you going to do with that? I’m going to pay everybody a bonus. Okay. Fantastic. How many people you got? Ten. Okay, so you’re going to pay them, yeah, I’ll pay them x.
Right. Now, what do you suppose that it’ll be like when you all get together either virtually or in a pub or a bar somewhere [01:27:00] and you make the announcement, everybody, thank you for the most amazing contribution over the past 12 months. I got little surprised for you and then you tell him that you’ve got this pot of money that you’re going to split amongst them.
What do you suppose that will be? Like, what do you, what do you think they’ll do? Oh, they’ll cheer. Fantastic. Okay. Your client’s having an experience now of what it’s going to be like. He’s telling you what it’s going to be like. They’ll be cheering because I’m dishing out a bonus on an additional 400, 000 with a GM that we’ve generated as a result of getting a salesperson on board, that we were able to afford by increasing our margins from 20 percent to 40 percent now, right?
Outcome of the outcome of the outcome. So, How do you think we need to, what do you think we need to do to get there? Well, we need to do this, this, and this, and this. Well, that’s exactly what we do. That’s what we do for a living. That’s our job. It’s my job to get you there.
Charlie: As a, as a bumper in that. So as a bonus for potentially for the readers, there are two [01:28:00] questions that I get hit with most often when we’re having that sales conversation.
I’m sure Thomas has the same. Which is, the first one is one, I’ve got to take this away and think about it and ask my team. How do you, you know, if they’re already at that place where they’re saying okay, I really want to buy this thing, what do they say? What do you say to get them present to that?
Ross: The glib answer is, if you get, I’ve got to take this away and discuss it with my partner, was that you didn’t qualify the call hard enough before you went into it.
And we all do that, right? We all do that. But it still doesn’t excuse us for doing it. And so it’s important to know. If it’s, if it’s the first conversation, uh, then it’s a part of your qualification criteria needs to be, okay, this is really interesting that we’re having this conversation. How do these decisions get made within your business?
Who has to be involved? Who signs it off? [01:29:00] Can you make the decision unilaterally and spend the money or do you have to jump through hoops? What do you have to do? I find that out so you can accommodate it. Um, if you’re able to accommodate it, when you get to the stage of having been in a position to create.
Or get the customer to create this amazing value for themselves that they say they have to take it away and think about it. I think my response to that would be something along the lines of you’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking about this because the entire case that you have built has come from you answering your own questions.
So if we go back to that previous example, You lit up when you told me that you wanted to hear the cheer when the bonuses were being announced. You lit up when you realized that you were going to get another 400, 000 worth of margin because you hired this salesperson. You lit up when you realized that you could go from 20 percent to 40%.
[01:30:00] These are all your numbers. You’ve already made these decisions. What else needs to be thought about?
Charlie: Well, whether we have the budget.
Ross: You currently earn 20 points of margin. On your existing sales. And there’s a clear roadmap ahead for you that shows you how to transform that to 40 percent and then double it again, or double your turnover again, simply through following the logic that we’ve already been through here, would you like me to go and find the money for you?
Who wouldn’t invest
Thomas: in
Ross: that?
Thomas: I would say, okay, that, that sounds great. Russ, uh, still needs to talk with my business partner, or I still need to talk to the person that qualifies that can actually make the decision.
Ross: Well, I’ll, I’ll go back, which is, if you’ve qualified properly beforehand, then you won’t have that conversation [01:31:00] ’cause you’ll make sure that they’re in the room with you.
’cause it’s all about planning the conversation. So, um, as you start doing this and making these mistakes, you’ll be able to see what you need to do as you encounter these things. So if you know that you’re about to have, if I, if I know that I’m about to have a call. with Thomas, that we’re going to discuss these things.
And then Thomas is going to create a scenario for himself, which is a no brainer that he wants to do. Then I’ll probably, before we get into the call and say, Thomas, we’re going to cover some really, really interesting stuff in our next conversation. And you’re probably going to say to me, Ross, I’m going to have to go away and talk to my business partner about this.
So I’m going to say, can you make sure that they join us? Because they need to hear this too. And what I don’t want to happen, Thomas, is for us to have a conversation that we’re both delighted with, and then for you to go and Give your business partner a [01:32:00] secondhand version of the conversation that he maybe does a really good job of deconstructing, which leaves you doubting your own sanity here, because that’s often what your business partner will do.
So he needs to be in the call with us. So if he’s got any issues, we can discuss it then and there, because we’re going to get to a stage in the conversation, as we always do, where it either starts from a certain point. Or it ends from a certain point. And so if we’re going to do this, it’s going to do, we’re going to do this at the end of this next conversation.
I’m going to ask you to make a decision. I’m going to ask you to say, what would you like to do now, Thomas? And on the basis of that, that’s how we’re going to proceed. And if you tell me, no, I don’t want to do it. I think it sucks. Well, that’s okay. It’s not what I want to hear, but that’s better than me coming back again and again and again because we find new people that we need to talk to.
Now you might think, well, that comes across as a bit arrogant and it’s, it’s not, it’s, it’s being respectful of everybody’s time. This is serious. The numbers that we’re talking about are real numbers [01:33:00] for the business health of your company. Now this is what we’re talking about here. We’re not having this in the game.
So you’re either serious about this or you’re
Thomas: not. And I think time, time is the only thing you can lose. Very quickly in these kinds of conversations. Oh yeah. Hundreds of follow ups like, you know, if, if, and the hard part here is I think that people often won’t give you an explicit no, unless asked as you mentioned.
Ross: Yeah, you can, you can just, you know, tell them it’s okay to say no, but maybe it’s not an answer. It’s either a yes or no, because look, we’re both busy. If it’s a no, that’s good. You can get back to your day job and so can I.
Charlie: Because that was the other question was, um, you’ll have a good, I mean, some of this, some of the stuff that Thompson and I sell is a longer sales cycle.
So you’ll have a good introduction call. You’ll walk through the meat of it. I mean, how many calls is too many? How many calls is enough? And eventually there’ll be like, okay, I’m going to put you in, you know, you’ll speak to the big boss and say, that’s brilliant. [01:34:00] I’ll put you in touch with the head of department for X.
And that individual might not come through.
Ross: Yeah. Now that is going to be the biggest challenge that most people face. And that’s why it’s really important to get your campaign plan ironed out right at the very beginning. So let’s say Thomas has to go to the CEO. Really early on when I say, Thomas, so when your business is making a decision around these things, can you explain your role in it?
And then once you’ve completed what you do, what happens next? And then Thomas might say, well, I’ve got to take it through a head of operations and then jointly we’ll take it to the CEO for sign off. Warning sign number one. Okay, does the CEO even know that you’re talking about this? Right? Because he’s not going to sign on anything just because somebody drops a piece of paper in front of him.
He needs to be absolutely convinced of the benefits. And so, uh, if you can, what you should do is say, well, that’s good. No, thank you for that. Now, [01:35:00] um, as part of our engagement, what I’d like to do is I’d like to arrange, uh, a series of agreed documented calendar fixed up calls. Uh, I’d like to meet, uh, chief of operations and I’d like 15 minutes with your CEO because I’d be very, very keen to understand what he thinks he’s going to get out of this.
And it’s important for me to hear that so that anything that I get back to you is within the framework of what his expectation is. Because the last thing that we want is for you and I to go off on a tangent somewhere, come up with something magnificent, but he’s looking for something in purple and we’ve come back with something in green.
And that gives them an excuse to say no. So I’m not trying to jump over your head here, but it’s important that we have all our ducks lined up so that we can move this through as quickly and efficiently as possible. And that includes qualifying out if we’re not the right people for you. So, it’s really important to make sure that you know who’s going to be [01:36:00] involved in the decision making process.
Now, if they say, he won’t see you, or she won’t see you, well, you can accept that, or you, and take a great big risk, or you can kind of go around it a little bit. Perhaps you might send them, uh, an email, uh, that says, dear Mr. or Mrs. So and so, uh, I’m currently working with your team on this project. very much.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, um, they’ve described the, how you acquire stuff. Normally, what we like to do is, um, create an executive sponsor relationship between our CEO and the CEO of our clients. And so, what I’d like to do is organize a 15 minute call between yourself and, um, Mary Smith, who’s our CEO.
Whatever. Even if they say no to that, they know that you’re talking to their guys about a project that they’re going to be [01:37:00] asked to spend money on. So try to cover all this stuff off. And when you do that, it also keeps the people that you’re, you’re working with on side. Because one of the great dangers with dealing with project managers is or people of a project manager mindset is that project managers are very focused on the project.
Right? Deliver the project by Tuesday at three o’clock. They might not care about a 20 percent to 40 percent increase in margin. And that’s what you’re selling. So they’re not in a position to buy because they don’t understand the value. So you need to be speaking with the people who understand the value of a 40 percent gross margin as opposed to a 20 percent gross margin.
Charlie: Because that’s not their metric. That’s not their KPI. No, so they don’t care. They just want to get it done on time so they can get paid. I see what you’re saying,
Ross: right? So don’t don’t don’t be bullied by people’s organizational structure say that no, you can’t get past me I’m the guy that’s running this project [01:38:00] because the simple retort to that is but are you God?
Are you the guy putting his hand in his wallet and paying for it? Yeah Well, no, that’s who we need to speak to
Charlie: Well, I don’t think I have to say that anyone listening to this is going to find this hugely, hugely valuable. Well, you know, it’s, it’s the, the pathway to selling your new startup product. If you’ve listened to this carefully and you implement that stuff, you shouldn’t have a problem.
Um, we’re moving on to section four now, which is the. The, the little piece that we, we’ve put in since the first episode, which is your desert island startup essentials. Um, what would be your, you know, if you were going to start a new business and you’re going to a desert island, what would be the five essential things that you bring with you?
Ross: Oh, a toothbrush, uh, an A3 pad of paper and a never needing sharpened pencil. [01:39:00] And you know why I’d ask for that? Because we have drawn so many mind maps and, and, uh, and plans on that. Um, I think it’s. When you’ve got ideas floating around in your head and you’re busy, it’s very, very important, I have found personally, to either articulate them through discussing them with somebody else, because actually verbalizing things brings order to the chaos of what’s in your head.
And so that stuff that you think that you understand that you haven’t verbalized, you don’t actually understand. Because if you’re struggling to put it into words, then you don’t understand it yet. And putting it down on paper or drawing it, it’s the same thing. I’d bring a couple of books. I’d probably bring, oh, Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson.
Charlie: Okay.
Ross: Good, good book. Um, it introduced me to all sorts of things that I would never have found out on my own. One of which [01:40:00] was, uh, the concept of E prime in English, which is in E prime in English, you take the verb to be, the word is out of your dialogue. Uh, it removes so many confrontations and opportunities for misunderstandings.
So for example, if, if I say that tree is brown, I’m stating that as a categorical fact. That may be the way that I interpret it because of my eyesight, but you may see it as a different color. Whereas if I say that tree seems to be brown to me, that leaves room for somebody else to hold a contrary opinion without falling out.
So for example, in managing an employee or somebody who’s not performing, you might say, Your performance is crap. Now that may be true, but that could be interpreted. You could, you might say, uh, there’s a better way. But here’s an example. You say on the face of it, your performance [01:41:00] appears to be very below expectation,
right? Saying the same sort of thing, but it’s leaving it open for let’s have a dialogue about this. The way you probably want to handle it is, is say, so if you were to ask my opinion on your performance today, what do you suppose I might say? And then they’ll hang themselves. Um, I think what I would bring with me is the first of the essentials in terms of, business startup is learn about outcomes of outcomes.
There is nothing else. Nothing else really matters. Everything else can be encapsulated within the umbrella of outcome of outcome. If you focus on that, you’re constantly looking towards the, what becomes possible? What will you experience? What will you notice? And their answers provide value that you can turn into [01:42:00] numerical value, which turns into.
irrevocable business case. So I wish I’d learned that in 1981. We wouldn’t be having this conversation now if that had happened.
And, and the last one is, um, uh, there’s, there’s two, uh, they’re not linked, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll join them for convenience. Um, one is understand whether you’re a professional hobbyist or whether you really are an entrepreneur, because they’re very, very different things. They do different things. One’s not better than the other.
But if you are in fact a professional hobbyist, but you think you’re an entrepreneur, you’re going to make your life very, very difficult for yourself. I know because I’m a professional hobbyist. And what you do is you work with entrepreneurs, right? And there’s nothing bad about it. That’s how Hewlett Packard was formed.
Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett. [01:43:00] Bill Hewlett was a technical genius. Bill Hewlett built amazing things. But he was a professional hobbyist. He just loved the tech. He was so in love with his tech. Dave Packard was the entrepreneur. He was able to take Bill Hewlett’s tech and have outcome of the outcome conversations with people at Disney that got them the start that they needed that turned them into a really fantastic company for a while until they became too big.
Um, but it’s important to know it’s good for your own sanity. Right? There’s nothing the matter with being a professional hobbyist. Your passion will come across to your clients. Just make sure that you have somebody to bounce your ideas off, to make sure that when you have your business conversations, you’re not talking about bits and bytes and nanoseconds and picoseconds.
Talk about outcomes of outcomes. And, uh, the other one is show up. Capital letters. Capital letters. If you show up and talk out outcomes, the outcomes, you’ll be [01:44:00] successful. Guaranteed.
Charlie: I agree. Um, so I mean, to wrap up, I think there’s far too many points. So this says here for me to summarize the key insights.
And I don’t think I’m capable of doing that, to be honest.
Thomas: I, I, I’d argue that, uh, outcome of outcomes of outcomes. I think the outcome
Charlie: of outcome. Storytelling, detachment biases, initial interactions, uh, psychology of human behavior, value propositions and customer’s needs, financial incentives and ROI, self selling, use of questions.
And then the five essentials Prometheus rising. I didn’t expect. Have
Ross: you read it?
Charlie: I haven’t read it. No, I’ll put it on the list. But yeah, I think. Ross, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to give our listeners and viewers invaluable contributions. And I think that concludes episode two, navigating the sales [01:45:00] landscape of Ross McKenzie.
Any, any sign off Ross?
Ross: Um, is the check going to bounce Charlie?
It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you very much. Um, I hope your ears aren’t bleeding. Well, you know how excited I get about this stuff. I’ve been doing this all of my working life and it’s still as exciting to me today as it was when, when I first started. Um, but the one last little thought and that is if you want to do this, it’s meant to be hard to begin with, right?
Cause you’re learning something of incredible value. You’re not going to find it in YouTube. You’re not going to get it on a course. You’ll get it through coaching, through mentoring, or through digging it out the dirt like I did, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it. It’s, it’s, uh, it transforms the way that you engage with [01:46:00] your clients.
And when they see how much fun you have being with them and serving them and helping them understand what’s going to be possible for them, that never gets old. And when you see your client’s eyes light up. Man, that’s just, it’s almost as good as getting paid.
Charlie: Almost. All right, Ross, can you tell the audience where they can find you and what’s the best way to get in touch?
Ross: The easiest way to get in touch is either through valuementor. io or my other website, which is rossmackenzie. net. And that’s R O S S M A C K E N Z I E dot net. Either one of those, or through you, of course. You keep my diary.
Charlie: We’ll be back next week with another interesting guest.
[01:47:00] everyone.
