Disrupt with the Right Sales Presentation: Sales Pitch Pro

Tony Goodchild

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Mark S A Smith: Today’s program is a little unusual. Normally we don’t dig into products, we talk about ideas. But this product is such a great idea I want to share it with my listener and give you an idea of what’s possible to help you substantially increase the success of your sales team, substantially increase the success of your of sales conversations and presentations. The man who’s done that is Tony Goodchild. He’s been in the world of high-tech sales for a long time, has done something to help people do a whole lot better job and when he introduced me to his product, Sales Pitch Pro, I was blown away. What probably impressed me the most is I had a features list that was very close to what he has created so he’s actually generated a product that I wanted to create. Welcome to the show, Tony Goodchild.

Tony Goodchild: Thanks very much Mark. It’s great to talk to you.

Mark S A Smith: Tony has created a platform that allows sales teams and vendors and companies to put together the perfectly tuned sales presentation. Tuned to the people you’re talking to. Tony, how did you decide to build a tool like this?

Tony Goodchild: I’ve spent probably 15 years trying to sell technical products and I’ll put my hands up and I’m gonna say 100% honest, fashion at front, I have never been a salesperson. I’ve never had quotas, I’m quite happy to have never have done that. What I have been is a product specialist and I’ve supported salespeople. Of course, we are an essential part of the sales process. So what I’ve seen is a lot of people who have technical product portfolios and really struggle to understand what those product portfolios can do and struggle to understand what their customers are having problems with. If they do understand those problems they have problems putting those two things together.

Mark S A Smith: You’re right about that.

Tony Goodchild: So, if they do figure out that this is the problem the customer’s got it’s very difficult for these guys to figure out what product I need to sell to match that.

Mark S A Smith: Well on the other side of that, depending on who you’re speaking with, the value propositions change wildly for the same product.

Tony Goodchild: Absolutely. It’s not just the case that you can use a one-off sales pitch to go in and talk about your product. You have to look at the nuances of, “Okay, today I’m walking in through the banking sector, tomorrow I’m walking into the finance sector, tonight I’m going to meet with someone from the education sector.” These people have different needs.

Mark S A Smith: They have different needs, they have different values, they have different requirements. They see the world in a completely different way.

Tony Goodchild: Exactly. And so your salesperson’s got to be able to understand that and build that knowledge into how they talk about the product and understand that what they do with that product is not going to be the same from role to role.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right. For some people for example they’re wanting to find out how the damn thing works. “How do I actually use this?” And others are like, “What’s the data that I’m collecting and how can that create a better insight for me in how to run my business?” Or other people are, “What’s this going to cost me in cash flow? What’s this going to cost in terms of maintenance and reliability?” Everybody has a different need that has to be filled.

Tony Goodchild: That’s not just specific to the market segment or the vertical that you’re selling into. Whenever you go in to meet with a customer there are going to be different people that are involved in that sales process. I’m from a telecoms background, we would sell to people who manufactured equipment. The next day we’d be meeting that person’s boss, then we’d we talking to their CTO, then we’d be talking to the person who ran the production line. All these people had different inputs into the sale and they all have different requirements and different priorities. Some of them, their priorities will be so different that they might be anti-your product. Others, they might be completely the polar opposite and need your product to do their day-to-day business.

Mark S A Smith: Because of that we have to know how to tailor our conversation to match the motivation of the person that we’re speaking with. One of the things that I have learned through the decades that I’ve been involved with selling disruptive products is this, no sales presentation meets all needs at any time. The challenge is that as you do a feature advantage and benefit pitch, which is the norm these days, the challenge is that you’re going to talk about features and advantages that the person you’re speaking to doesn’t find advantageous or beneficial. And so you created an objection. The challenge is that you do more than three of those in your pitch and you’re not going to get through the mess. Now, multiply that by the number of people who have to say, “Yes.” in typical technology world there’s at least three people that have to say yes before a deal is done.

So the traditional approach to just doing a canned presentation, a canned pitch doesn’t work. It fails, it causes way more problems than it solves. The way that you solved this with Sales Pitch Pro is the person dials in the job description and the roles and responsibilities and the information that we have determined is the right way to say and present shows up for the salesperson to have a relevant, meaningful conversation. Fantastic stuff.

Tony Goodchild: That’s exactly what we do. We call it the sales intelligence data. So it’s who are you selling to, what is your typical market? Let’s take all that data. Within each of those markets who are the typical people that are involved in selling into them? Let’s get all of that data. For each of those individual people what are the typical problem points that they tell you about or that your products solve? Let’s get all of that data in as well. So now what we have is a way of qualifying and breaking down your customer and saying, “Okay, today I’m walking to this meeting and I’m meeting with three people. They’re from this particular sector. And now I’m going to talk to them and I’m going to listen. As I’m listening to them tell me about their problems I’m just checking off boxes on a screen here, on an iPad.”

From that we can categorize which of the problem points are most relevant, which of the roles are most relevant to those problems and we can pull out a list of products. The list of products we give you are the most relevant products in your portfolio to match that set of requirements. Now you don’t have to try and work out, “Okay, based on this I now need to bring in someone else to try and help me work out what to pitch. I’m not trying to set up a second meeting with a product specialist. I’m going to go and I’m going to say, “Okay, thank you. I’ve understood what you’re telling me. Now I’m going to tell you about how we can fix that problem.” One of the things we try and do is introduce industry data into that conversation. So before you get to the point you’re talking about a product what you can say is, “Okay, I hear you’ve got this problem.

“What we’ve seen with dealing with people within your sector is that if they’re doing this typically this is happening as well. Do you recognize that problem? Is it something you’ve considered? It might happen to you in six months, it might happen to you in 12 months.” You can open up that conversation around from the immediate problems that that customer has, it allows you to explore other avenues which might better position your products. But it also allows you to demonstrate your value to the customer, how much you know about their industry, how much you know about the trends that might affect them. So it really helps build your credibility in front of them at the same time.

Mark S A Smith: What I really love about this system Ton is it automates the upsell, cross-sell process without necessarily having the salesperson being tightly trained. Because it keeps them up to date automatically by introducing the adjacent solutions and adjacent problems. It is so good. It makes salespeople instantly more credible, it reduces the amount of training that’s required and illustrates to customers that you know their industry substantially increasing trust. This application of information and artificial intelligence to the sales process is so important in high-consideration products. Well done. But wait, there’s even more. You can help tailor the sales process to that which has been embraced by the organization. When you showed me that I was really impressed, the fact that you can select whether using signature selling or SPIN selling or-

Tony Goodchild: Challenger sales or Miller Heiman. We have support to build data in around these selling methods which you’re using challenger sales, a customer puts in a potential blocker. You can turn that right round and challenge their perception of why they think that’s a blocking opportunity and you can argue those cases if you’re using spin selling. I mean it’s one of the older methods but you can introduce those implication questions, those need questions. If you’re talking to your economic buying influence or your technical buying influence, your coach, you can build in information about how to speak to those guys specifically. So we really want to make sure that Sales Pitch Pro fits in with the flow of what we’re doing. We’re not trying to change how you sell as a process but what we’re doing is augmenting your team.

So up skilling them, allowing them to really understand how they should work with customers. The information that we get back from customers and then turning that into the perfect sales message.

Mark S A Smith: The thing I love about this is the way that you’ve designed the data input, the sales intelligence, is it allows a vendor who is selling their technology through their sales channel whether it’s an in-house sales channel or a third party sales channel, the people that are selling it can select the selling methodology that they feel most comfortable with. You automatically make all the adaptations to the presentation that shows up on the iPad. It’s just absolutely brilliant. What this means is that you design it once and then it goes out into the field and plugs into the brain of the people that are doing the selling just absolutely perfectly. It fits the culture, it fits the process and provides them with the information they need at the moment they need it with the relevance that’s required to get the job done. Brilliant stuff.

Tony Goodchild: Thanks. Talking about the partners, that’s a really big part of this. Any time you’re expanding internationally, you’re teaming up with sales partners and distributors it’s very hard to work with these types of teams because they have maybe three or four other vendors that they’re trying to sell. So maybe they have 50 other products to sell and you’ve got to not only train them how to sell your product and recognize the value of your product you’ve got to gain that team’s mind share.

Mark S A Smith: Right on.

Tony Goodchild: The way you can do that is to make it extremely easy to sell your product because they want to sell, they want to make money, they want to make money for themselves and for the company that they work for. If you take Sales Pitch Pro and push that out to your sales partner network it’s very easy for them to get that same level of skill that your internal sales teams have. That will gain the mind share of those companies.

Mark S A Smith: Indeed. In fact you also have a module that allows people to take just in time on-demand product training so a half an hour before they have a presentation with a customer you’re feeding them the information that they need in a short video tutorial right on the spot. And then of course you’re prompting them with the right questions and the right offerings right out of the box. So that salespeople can walk in confident and enthusiastic about the conversation, allowing them to focus on the relationship which is what they own and not necessarily spending all the time with the product knowledge which will be prompted in an appropriate way. To me that’s such a big challenge to the traditional element of having salespeople sit through training classes, burning sales time for a product they don’t yet know if customers are going to even want to find a conversation of value.

What I see you doing is really accelerating the sales, the go-to market process, the ability to take new products into the sales team and get rapid success right from the launch of the product.

Tony Goodchild: Yes. It’s essential, when you launch new products you’ve got that new product introduction. One of the things that can happen, a lot of the cases your sales team will run out and they’ll give it to every customer they can find and very enthusiastically show off this new product.

Mark S A Smith: And they’ll blow it.

Tony Goodchild: Yeah, it might not even be the right product to talk about.

Mark S A Smith: Right, they’ll enthusiastically destroy the relationship and quit selling it because it’s hard to sell. It’s not hard to sell, it’s just they’ve said the wrong things to the wrong people and they haven’t created that alignment of value.

Tony Goodchild: Exactly.

Mark S A Smith: I see it all the time.

Tony Goodchild: I flew into a certain country, went into a customer meeting. Halfway through the salesperson nudged me and whispered in my ear, “When are you going to start talking about the new product?” Which is why he’d set this meeting up. I said, “I’m not, I’m selling this one.” It continued on because I realized immediately that he had set this meeting up around a new product that had just been launched but it didn’t meet the requirements that the customer had. So I was able to sell in a five year old product, it might not have been as sexy, it may not have been the product that the company was trying to sell. But you know what? It met that customer’s requirements and we were able to sell it.

Mark S A Smith: Right on. The goal is to sell what the customer wants and has the budget for and can say yes to as fast as humanly possible. But wait, there’s more to Sales Pitch Pro, and that is the reporting component. This is the piece that gets me even more excited than the custom tailoring of the conversation. Tell us about what sales managers and sales VPs and vendor marketing teams get from Sales Pitch Pro.

Tony Goodchild: There are metrics for almost everything in your sales process, there are tools that do just about everything. There are tools that will send emails and tell you how many of them were read. There are tools that will look into social media and see how many people are looking at your brand? There are tools that help you work on your funnel. There are tools that help you look at how many products are selling and what your closing rate is. But eventually during this sale you’re going to be faced, sitting opposite a customer with none of those tools available and you’re going to have to try and sell. That’s where we built Sales Pitch Pro. Sales Pitch Pro is designed to sit in that meeting where previously there was no other tool that you could use. People would be pulling out bits of PowerPoint and trying to pick out presentations that they’d write up the night before.

But Sales Pitch Pro sits with you in those meetings and helps you through those. What we get out of that is a whole bunch of analysis of what happened in those meetings? It’s the first time we’ve been able to pull metrics out from a face-to-face customer sales meeting and then look at it and say, “Okay, now we know what verticals our sales team are typically meeting with, the type of pain points that these guys are saying.” Not just anecdotal feedback at the end of a quarter. We’re now able to say, “This is exactly what the people in this vertical said during this last quarter. This is what the people in the other vertical said during this last quarter. This is what the people at the sea level said to us in the last quarter or six months or whatever it might be.” As we move on through we can see the products we pitched, how well did those product pitches go.

Based on the fact that we had X number of pitches made how many of those got onto quotes? How many of those got in through evaluations? Is it that they are working better in one sector than another? Does it resonate more with one role or another? We can tell you how well your messaging works. Is your messaging working great in one sector but it’s not resonating enough in another sector? We can see I think your sales people actually being able to pitch this to the rest of the team. You might have a guy that’s really good at pitching a product. Again, maybe he’s really good at pitching it into the banking sector. But when he takes that same product and talks to the healthcare sector it’s still an irrelevant product. But if he doesn’t understand that sector well enough to position it then we can say, “Okay, let’s pull this guy out.

“Let’s give him a little bit of coaching specifically around that area that he’s struggling with,” and we can get very, very granular. We can give product managers information about the main problem points that these customers are telling them about. If that doesn’t match with the product you’re designing you can refine that. We get very granular metrics telling you exactly what’s happening in sales meetings, exactly how well your messaging is working, and whether your products are really matching those pain points and whether those are understood by the customer.

Mark S A Smith: Right on. Plus you know exactly who’s talking to whom along the way. Sales Pitch Pro will feed data back into CRM systems, both draw it from it as well as back in. So it interfaces between the two.

Tony Goodchild: Yes. What we want to be able to do is also support those salespeople. You know the worst thing is, you’ve had a long day, you’ve been traveling between customers, running around meeting to meeting to meeting. At the end of the day you find yourself in some coffee shop or hotel room and you’re trying to read through your scribbled down notes you had from your meeting and trying to enter those into whichever CRM your business is using. We are able to template that data so we track how that meeting progressed, what products were discussed, who you’d met with. We will automatically create those records within the CRM for you so you don’t have to worry about how accurate your memory is at the end of the day. We will do that within the meeting, the sales guy doesn’t have to do anything. He just types in the name of the people they’ve met with.

We will store his follow up actions, we will store the collateral that was shared with that customer and we’ll store exactly what drove that meeting. When we share collateral what we also do is track when that’s being opened and again that goes back up into the CRM and notifications go out to that salesperson as well. So they know to make that follow up call. It’s all about using as much data as possible coming from that meeting and we will drag in every bit of data we can about how that meeting progresses and use that to make the most positive impact on that salesperson that we can.

Mark S A Smith: I love the fact that while you’ve got your iPad open there you can click on whatever information you want to send to the customer, it gets emailed to them, we find out when they look at it, when they read it, all that gets aggregated. Then of course that information gives us an indication of the urgency of this particular customer. So if you send something to them and they open it up that same day and they open it up several times and they forward it on to somebody else and they open it several times you know you’ve got an urgent situation. Versus if you email it to them and they do nothing you know there’s not a lot of urgency here. I love the fact that we actually get information about customer urgency and propensity out of the data that we collect. Powerful stuff.

Tony Goodchild: Yes. Having access to that data, having access to knowing what is happening in real life sales meetings on a real-time basis is very, very powerful. And so the analysis that you can do and learning how to coach your team, learning how to change your product messaging, learning how to change your product, that’s an invaluable resource.

Mark S A Smith: We can make those pivots instantly by changing the information that’s presented on the iPad. And so we can push out updates, we don’t have to make people sit through training classes or webinars. They get what they need the moment they need it. This is lean hierarchy sales and absolutely brilliant with the just in time training. I want to get back to the CRM issue. I got an email just this morning from a client and friend of mine who said, “We’re only getting 22% of our salespeople to input the information that we need into the CRM. It’s driving our execs absolutely crazy because we’re not getting the data we need to do our logistics management. We have long lead times, we need to get a feeling for what is being offered so that we can decide what to schedule for production.” And it’s driving people nuts. Sales Pitch Pro takes care of that problem automatically.

Tony Goodchild: Yes. It’s one of those things that every salesperson hates. I’m yet to speak to a salesperson who says, “You know I really look forward to the end of the day when I get to sit down and enter my data into the CRM.” They enjoy getting in front of customers, they enjoy the challenge of getting to know that customer and getting a sale with that customer. What they hate is sitting down and doing admin work.

Mark S A Smith: Of course they do.

Tony Goodchild: We want to take as much pain away out of this sales process as possible. From a pure salesperson’s point of view that’s probably the biggest pain that they have is to just sit there and feed data into these systems. It’s an essential part of the job because as you said if you can’t get that forecast you can’t buy the parts, you can’t run your production lines and ultimately you can’t meet delivery schedules.

Mark S A Smith: It’s the thing that drives every salesperson, every COO, every VP of sales, every VP of marketing absolutely nuts. It’s the disconnect between the customer conversation and the rest of the organization. With Sales Pitch Pro grabbing the information, feeding it back automatically into the system, it fixes those problems. Boom.

Tony Goodchild: Job done.

Mark S A Smith: That’s it. Everybody wins. What else does Sales Pitch Pro do that changes the way that people sell for the better?

Tony Goodchild: As well as being able to sell in a much more informed environment so that you know the product you’re talking about is really going to be the one that solves that customer’s problems, the other thing we do is we make that sales process much, much, much shorter. Especially a technical environment, there would be a number of different people from a sales team involved in getting out in front of customers. So maybe you’ve got some inside salespeople or some people doing your prospecting for you and they have their job to do and then you come in and you take those leads and you go and meet with the customer and you explore what their requirements are. Supposedly you should then turn that into a solution. That’s where a lot of people, as we said earlier, they will struggle to do that. It’s not a bad thing, they have their set of skills and their set of skills is to sell. If you’re talking about technical products you need that technical expertise to back you up.

Mark S A Smith: Right on.

Tony Goodchild: The problem is if you have not been able to qualify it to the degree required where you can bring in the correct resource you’re going to create a lot of lag and a lot of delay in your process. I’ve been in this situation before where I’ve been asked to come into a meeting and people are busy. It takes three to four weeks to get everyone’s calendars scheduled up, you’ve got the sales guy’s going to be there, the customer’s going to be there, the customer’s bosses want to be there, the product specialist wants to be there. You’ve all got to travel to this location. It’s not a small effort to go and attend these types of meetings. Then you get there and you go in and you realize actually this is not the set of requirements you understood it should be. I haven’t brought the right product with me today to talk about.

I’m not even the right guy to talk about these products. So actually what you then have to do is go out and say, “Okay, let’s reevaluate. Tell me again about your needs.” You then have to go and say, “Okay, now I think we need to bring in someone else.” And you talk about a different set of products. Straight away in that kind of scenario you might have put two months of delay into the sales process through incorrectly qualifying it the first time, bringing the wrong resources in. What we do is we’re able to shorten that rate down so all of that qualification is happening correctly the first time and you’re moving on from having the qualification conversation to actually having the product conversation in that same meeting. You may still need to bring product specialists in because there are some times there are going to be questions that everyone can’t answer.

You’re going to need to bring in that specialist to get really into the nitty gritty of what the product does. We can accomplish that a lot more with one sales guy and Sales Pitch Pro and he can do the equivalent of one, two, three or four sales meetings. That shortening of the sales cycle means he’s now freed up to go and talk to other customers and bring in additional revenue. Not only are we saying that you can increase your selling success but you know what? You’re now going to have much more free time to go and move onto that next opportunity and bring that opportunity in as well.

Mark S A Smith: The challenge that we face in high consideration sales situations, which is what Sales Pitch Pro is designed to do. That is to make a presentation about a product or service to multiple decision-makers, that’s always high consideration. You get multiple people involved, it’s high-consideration and to do so in the fastest possible method. Because we have to be relevant to each individual person it changes how we approach things. What I really love about this particular process is it puts into play a lot of the technology that I’ve been teaching for a long time. If you do things right, IFN you can sell a complex, expensive product in four meetings. Sales Pitch Pro is part of the tool that allows you to do it right. It compresses the sales process because it decreases the amount of risk and delivers the right amount of information to the right person at the right time so they can step forward in their purchasing process with confidence. That to me is one of the biggest aspects of what you’re offering to the world of sales.

Tony Goodchild: Everyone’s come into a sale late in the day and it’s the worst feeling when you go into an opportunity and the customer says, “Oh yeah, we’ve spoken to three of your competitors already.” So you know straight away you’re on the back foot. You need to be able to establish thought leadership very quickly. In the case where you have been maybe the fourth or fifth vendor invited to the table to discuss this requirement you may automatically assume that you’re behind the ball.

Mark S A Smith: Oh no.

Tony Goodchild: Actually you may still be in a case where those other companies are still trying to figure out what to pitch in as a solution. So being able to very quickly turn around and say, “I’ve understood what you’re saying. Here’s what we need to do, here’s what we can offer you and this is how we’re going to help you,” in that one meeting that gives you such an ability to turn that position around and establish yourself as the thought leader against your competition. Being able to respond quickly is enough to get you the deal in a lot of cases.

Mark S A Smith: That’s exactly right. In the world of competition, the person who can illustrate clarity, create confidence and show the best possible choice is going to win. That comes from being extremely efficient with your messaging strategy, completely relevant with what you’re bringing to the party and by expanding the value that the customer sees that you can deliver. That’s how you disrupt the competition every time. The really cool part about this is this methodology becomes invisible to the competition. They don’t even know what you’re doing, yet you have an accelerated education process, sales delivery process, identification of information back at the management food chain who can bring resources to bear that a typical salesperson may not have identified or know is available. By doing these things you create an extraordinary competitive advantage.

And you disrupt the competition and it’s just because of your sales process, not your product.

Tony Goodchild: Absolutely. You’ve seen this where you can see that a salesperson is scared as soon as you measured one particular competitor. There’s always that one competitor or the one product and as soon as you mention that you can see the look on a salesperson’s face change. They just don’t know how to react if they hear that that company is in competition with them, they hear they’re in on one of those deals. They get this irrational fear. “What am I going to do now? I don’t know how to turn this sale around.” What we also do with Sales Pitch Pro is we build in that data about the competitors into our sales intelligence. So if you’re in a meeting and the customer says to you, “I’m already talking to competitor X, I really like their product.” He will have immediately at his fingertips data to enable him to position his own product against that competition.

We want to make it so that there is no more fear in that meeting. If they say, “We’re talking to competitor X,” you say, “Okay. Well we do this, this, this, this and this.”

Mark S A Smith: Or what you can say is, “Great. Make sure next time you see them to ask them these three questions. Our customers who have chosen us have told us they’ve chosen us over competitor X because they do this, don’t do this, refuse to do this and it’s just a lot more expensive.” Or whatever it happens to be. The point is you can create landmines, you can create reposition, you can expand value, but you can create those competitive response packages and every salesperson has them right here, right now, creating more confidence, more enthusiasm, which creates more sales.

Tony Goodchild: Absolutely. A sales team can tear itself apart trying to work out how to respond to a competitive threat so not only do we bring that data into the meeting but we serve that up within our analytics. So if you think you’ve got a new competition entering your market or your territory and the feedback that a sales manager is getting is, “These guys are all over. They’re in every opportunity.” We can now go into the analytics and say to you, “You know what? These guys are really strong in that one territory but everywhere else we’re not seeing them.” So you know they’ve got a good reseller in a certain country. You can really qualify how well are they doing here and quantify where is it they’re operating? Are they really getting in through as many deals as we think they are? Are they really making that much of an impact?

If they’re only operating in a certain vertical for example you can pull that out and say, “Okay, well actually we don’t need to be scared of these guys. We know they’re operating in this vertical, let’s create our own messaging strictly addressing that just within that one sector. Let’s beat them down in that sector. We don’t need to go and analyze their complete product in-depth. Let’s see where they’re having an impact on us and go and beat them down at their own game.”

Mark S A Smith: Indeed. And you can push that out to the entire sales force right now, including a short video that introduces the idea and teaches them on what to do, what to say and how to behave next. To me this is just the most beautiful thing. I’m so glad you put into play what I invested about three years ago and then sat on. That’s exactly what it is. The other part that people might be thinking is, “Gee Tony, isn’t this really expensive? I can’t believe that you can sell it for as little as you offer it.” It’s a subscription service, you help them build it out for an onboarding fee which allows you to bring the information in and provide some consulting. I also have to say I’m available to provide some consulting for messaging and objection-busting strategies based on my technologies. But tell us a little bit about how this would work if somebody wanted to bring this into their organization.

Tony Goodchild: As you explained it is a per-seat subscription. It’s a monthly subscription and as you said we need to do this onboarding process. What we do is build out that set of sales intelligence data. We’ll put project managers in who will sit with your company and say, “Okay, tell us who is your head of marketing, tell us who’s your head of product, tell us who’s your head of sales.” We need inputs from all those different groups, we need you to tell us who are the people that you sell to? What are the segments? Which ways does it make sense to segment out those businesses if you want to target your marketing and your messaging towards them? We need all of that messaging material, we need all of the marketing material, we need all the data about your products. I’ve been questioned on, “Why do we have this onboarding process? Why do we not just send it to you and it’s all good?”

Mark S A Smith: Oh no. You need some pros to help you with the sales messaging and to identify the psychographics of the people you’re calling on. Of course that’s where Tony has experience, I have a lot of experience doing that. There’s others that can help you with that. But you’ve got to map that value proposition with how they make decisions in new ways. So yes, carry on.

Tony Goodchild: In reality that information won’t be readily available anyway. So even if they thought they could just send it to you they won’t have this to hand. So what we do is we want to put a project manager in there and he’s going to work with the broader team within the customer. We’ll say, “Okay, this is what we need. This is where we can see you have holes, we can see you don’t have this information here, here and here. So we can help by putting people in for you to create that. Some of it will need tweaking because it’s too broad. We need to make this really specific around the people you’re talking to, we need to make sure that that message is specific to the segments you’re talking to.” Because otherwise you can’t make those informed decisions around what product are you going to sell? If the person in the field can’t make that informed decision neither can our piece of software. So we need to have all these inputs for this to work.

Mark S A Smith: The great news is you can take your very best salesperson and install the capabilities into the rest of your sales team using this methodology.

Tony Goodchild: Exactly. And you know one of the hardest things to do is share success stories. How many times have you seen it where there’s one guy who, he’s come up with a great way of selling. But the only people that it expands out to might be the people in the sales territory he’s responsible for. It might be two or three of his buddies. Trying to get a successful message that the one guy has come up with that works for him and spread that into a global sales team is nearly impossible. All we can do is take those success stories, take the messaging, take the collateral that was used and then replicate that around every sales person you have. Think how powerful that is. Because we’re not just saying that this is something we do once and it’s static. This is something that evolves. So as you find things that work better let’s take them, replicate them and make sure that everyone has access to them instantly.

That’s how you build and build and build upon success and that’s how the message gets spread. People will be saying, “This is the competition that I’m scared of,” and you will be the predator within your industry.

Mark S A Smith: I love to win. Tony this has been a great conversation. I really enjoy this approach to the tools of creating more sales, it absolutely aligns with my belief and how we disrupt markets and take out the competition that don’t deserve to be alive. What’s the best way for our listener to continue this conversation with you, potentially with me as part of the buildup team?

Tony Goodchild: Very easy. They can visit us at Salespitchpro.com and there’s some phone numbers on there. They can use the emails. They can email me directly, tony@salespitchpro.com. If they want to contact you and you can introduce people or we can talk to them together that’s great. Or find me on LinkedIn. Tony Goodchild, you will see me as Sales Pitch Pro.

Mark S A Smith: We’ll have links, all of that to the show page. And yes, I’ve introduced you to quite a few people so far. Can’t wait to see the outcome of those conversations. Tony, what a great conversation. Thank you for all you’re doing to bring more excellence to the world of complex sales. I sure appreciate you.

Tony Goodchild: Thanks very much Mark. It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you this evening.

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