In this episode, the Founder of NxtStep Consulting Sean Boyce talks about the benefits of relationship selling, why you should always lead with value and the common sales tricks that just don’t work.
Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services.
To solve this Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time.
Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Consulting Trap:
- The problems with cold outreach on LinkedIn.
- Why some marketing techniques can have a negative impact on a business.
- The problems with taking a ‘hard sell’ marketing approach.
- Why you should always lead with value.
- What you can offer prospects before giving them the purchasing pitch.
- The benefits of relationship selling.
- Sales tricks that don’t work.
- How long your sales messages should be.
Resources:
Connecting with Sean Boyce:
Connecting with the host:
Quotables:
- 01:17 – “A lot of data points to people with kind of personalities that are good at listening as opposed to just speaking or talking or vomiting stuff all over people do a lot better in sales than those that are just trying to push some type of an agenda so I think the approach that most people take is wrong and I’ve got plenty examples of that.”
- 03:02 – “You know those guys when you’re walking around the city any major metro you’re walking around and there is dudes handing out the little flyer thing for the local mattress place and you’re like no man I was on my way to get coffee but now that I’ve got this flyer in my hands I’m carrying a mattress home like this is the answer, on my back. I think this is where a lot of folks get it wrong and we’ve talked about random acts of marketing in the past or random acts of salesmanship and the short answer is people choose to do business with people they like know or trust and the moment you start doing stuff like this you erode your trust factor immediately.”
- 06:55 – “Teslas they were trying to innovate in the dealership space and how the representatives for their brand at the actual retail locations the so-called dealerships how they were responding to people who came in versus how a typical car dealership would respond and instead of immediately trying to push what it is that they wanted to sell at that given moment to whoever walked in the doors their response was along the lines of what brings you in today, how can I help? Are you just browsing or whatever I’m here to help if you need my help great, if you don’t have fun, enjoy the cars experience it, whatever just immediately lowers the pressure for everyone involved.”
- 12:11 – “As a sales professional you have to move past the features and benefits conversation, they tell you in marketing 101 it’s all features and benefits and frankly features and benefits are the last thing that’s important if you’re talking about features, and benefits you’re talking about the wrong part of the horse, and this is the old story of Ford. Ford started really taking off when they stopped selling cars and started selling freedom, the same thing is true.”
- 18:27 – “In a world where digital shorts are the thing that is blown up, what are you missing about the keyword in that phrase, short. What you think that a longer message is going to get me a higher response rate, it’s really not necessary we live in a bite-sized world, attention spans are measured in nanoseconds everybody’s busy all the time, especially after the pandemic, so for the love of everything condense it, shorten it up, keep it short and sweet, saves you time, saves them time, get right to the point.”
